Abstract
Wilderness is an attractive yet problematic concept for how humans view or value land. In this volume, Feldt examines perceptions of wilderness within the ancient world and challenges the idea that it was merely seen as something to be exploited, conquered, or civilised. Instead, by re-engaging texts ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to late antique Gaul, Feldt uncovers evidence that the wilderness was important for identity formation, personal transformation, and inspiring wonder.
The volume begins with a short introductory chapter that outlines the main aims and argument, then the second chapter provides much of the theoretical underpinnings for the rest of the study. Through a survey of theories about wilderness, Feldt adopts a nuanced understanding of the concept and defines it as essentially a narrated or practiced liminal-zone primarily populated by nonhumans and over which humans do not have control. Feldt is primarily interested in how wilderness was presented within personal narratives where it functions to define an individual’s identity in relation to the environment. Her main approach to the texts is thus a narratological one which looks at each ancient text in three stages: setting out the environmental context of the empirical wilderness referred to; examining the normative understanding of nature in the narrative; enquiring into the embodied or lived experience of wilderness through narrative clues.
After these introductory and methodological remarks, Feldt’s study then embarks on its examination of wilderness traditions in a range of different ancient texts. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the wilderness within ancient Mesopotamian mythology by looking at Old Babylonian material and then the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh epic respectively. The Hebrew Bible is turned to in the next three chapters where Feldt looks at wilderness mythology in the Torah, the Elijah-Elisha narratives in the book of Kings, and the oracles in Isaiah 34–35. Early Christianity’s wilderness mythology is then examined by reading texts from the New Testament (in particular the Gospel of Matthew), Christian desert ascetic literature, and finally Western Christian texts from the late antique period. The final chapter provides an outline of the volume’s results and main conclusions, including a list of nine points which sum up the findings (p. 266). From the preceding discussion, Feldt argues that the wilderness was a benign domain in ancient mythologies where its complexity and ambiguity cannot be captured by a simple nature-culture dichotomy. The wilderness was considered at the same time both harmful and valuable: inspiring awe, transforming the self, and forming identity.
This is a methodologically-sophisticated study of how wilderness figures within a diverse range of ancient textual traditions. Feldt’s distinct narrative approach to the topic yields various new insights into how the wilderness was perceived here and which complexify reductive readings of these traditions as being solely at odds with the wild. This study also provides numerous positive reasons for continuing to engage with such ancient texts in our contemporary context of environmental crises.