ABSTRACT As a periodization that is generally understood to refer to an era of Terrestrial relationships that developed with modernization and nuclearization, the Anthropocene cannot be applied simply to premodern histories and texts. However, it has introduced historians to geological periodization as a mode of describing periods of changed Terrestrial relationships in time. This article suggests that, in thinking about how historicizing texts conceptualized environments, geological (“‐ocene”) periodization provides a useful model and grammar by which to observe and describe how authors understood their environmental pasts, the agencies involved in reshaping Terrestrial regimes, and the role of environments in periodization. This article uses two genres of historicizing texts from Western Britain in the twelfth century to develop an approach to reading geological periods out of such texts. It suggests that doing so not only reveals important information about how these authors thought about environments in time but also provides a model by which the “geological turn” in the environmental humanities and premodern history can be put into mutually productive conversation without being inappropriately constrained by a term that was developed for modern phenomena. Outwith the Anthropocene, reading texts for what they say about environmental pasts, times, and agencies enables environmental thought to be analyzed in multiple dimensions.
Gwenffrewi J. Morgan (Tue,) studied this question.