Since its rise in the mid-1990s, ecocriticism, the study of the depiction of the built and natural environments in literature, has been deeply engaged with contemporary political and social issues surrounding anthropogenic ecological degradation and climate change. Such an ideological outlook, however, limits the application of the discourse in the case of medieval literature, which lacks such contemporary resonance. Ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of the three witches with power over the environment in the Byzantine romances and their western analogues will nevertheless demonstrate the connection between nature control, femininity and patriarchal oppression and, as importantly, offer a theoretical framework for the application of an apolitical ecocriticism to Byzantine (and medieval) literature. Though ecocriticism 1 has by now become entrenched enough in academic and intellectual circles that it requires neither a general introduction nor a broad defense, some 1 In her 1996 introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryl Glotfelty asserts that 'the taxonomic name of this green branch of literary study is still being negotiated', C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens and London, 1996) xix, and offers as possible synonyms 'ecopoetics, environmental literary criticism, and green cultural studies' (op. cit. xviii, xx, italics in original). Glotfelty further notes that each of these names comes with its own advantages and problems, and that, in fact, 'Many critics write environmentally conscious criticism without needing or wanting a specific name for it' (op. cit. xx). In his 2002 reappraisal of the discipline, Lawrence Buell, among the most prominent theorists of ecocriticism, rejected the term he himself had done so much to popularize; even as he acknowledges that '"ecocriticism" may well be here to stay,' he suggests instead the term 'environmental criticism', The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford 2005) 11. His 'reason for belaboring the terminological issue is the implicit narrowness of the 'eco,' insofar as it connotes the 'natural' rather than the 'built' environment' (op. cit. 11). In the ten years since The Future of Environmental Criticism, however, even as the interaction between the built and natural environments that caused Buell to propose the new term has become increasingly incorporated into ecocritical discourse, Buell's preferred term for emphasizing that theoretical distinction has neither slowed the increasing hegemony of 'ecocriticism' as the disciplinary marker, nor gained traction as an independent term in its own right, and it is both to avoid any such terminological confusion and to place my own work within this larger intellectual movement that I have chosen to use 'ecocriticism' in my own title.
