We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura” and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura” ) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Rather than trawl through medieval philosophical texts for references to selfhood, I analyse a story Chaucer knew well: that of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus’s fatal encounter with his own reflection suggests a number of points: i) that self-awareness is associated with sight (the word ‘introspection’ means ‘looking within’); ii) that beauty also is associated with sight; iii) that love makes one self-aware (Narcissus understands that his love-object is himself, not that that helps him any); iv) that sight can be ironically linked to moral blindness. Chaucer explores all these points, often with reference to mirrors, and to women in love or being loved. Medieval mirrors were usually small and convex, requiring the viewer to stand close to interpret the distorted images from multiple angles that they generated. Chaucer especially represents women experiencing how it feels to ‘be me’, making of his own poetry a mirror that reflects from oblique positions.