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- Convenors:
-
Genevieve Warwick
(University of Edinburgh)
Samuel Cohn (University of Glasgow)
Colin Coates (Glendon College, York University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Deeper Histories, Diverse Sources, Different Narratives
- Location:
- Room 9
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This session interrogates the perception, formation, and representation of new landscapes at the historical cusp of global geography circa 1492. Bringing together historians of land, art, music, and literature, it addresses changing conceptions of landscape across world cultures and cultural forms.
Long Abstract:
This session interrogates the perception, formation, and representation of new landscapes at the historical cusp of global geography circa 1492. Bringing together historians of land, flora and fauna, and their larger cultural perception in word and image, it addresses changing conceptions of landscape across world cultures, from Marco Polo’s Milione to the Columbian exchange. Circumnavigation wrought vast transformations to geographical conceptions of land, manifest in shifting patterns of agriculture and clearances, but also newfound flora and fauna. The aim of the session is to consider relationships between land histories and cultural manifestations in the era of world discovery. This comprises the rise of commercial agricultural practices alongside the formation of villa landscapes; wetland drainage and forest clearance alongside the growth of cities that intensive agriculture could now support; the Columbian exchange of flora and fauna alongside the rise of botanic gardens, botanic illustration, and the newly-scientific study of plants; the realisation of climate change as a consequence of land transformations from the Venetian terraferma to the Caribbean; the practice of land surveys alongside a dawning perception of the hydrologic cycle by engineers, scientists, and artists to result in field irrigation and urban water supply as well as ornamental gardens and fountains; the gathering geographical exchange between east and west in the development of world cartographies and topographies; and their complex manifestations in art, music, and literature, from fairy tales and folk songs to landscape painting and poetics of the pastoral.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The study addresses the ways in which a project in Pedralbes Monastery (Barcelona) represented and reproduced the medieval horticultural landscape and it discusses how environmental history was integrated into its development and realization.
Paper long abstract:
In 2014, the Pedralbes Museum of Barcelona which administrates the Pedralbes Monastery, undertook an archaeological and historical project which consisted in recovering the medieval period (1300-1492) of the community's vegetable garden of the monastery, which existed from the 14th century to the mid-20th century. The study addresses the ways in which the project represented and reproduced the medieval horticultural landscape and it discusses how environmental history was integrated into its development and realization. In particular, this study will: a) interrogate the representation of the horticultural and animal landscape prior to 1492; b) examine how the museum’s dissemination activity of the project established connections between medieval agriculture and contemporary ecological agriculture; c) interrogates how the project integrates the objectives of environmental history with those of museography and the social services of the city.
Paper short abstract:
The early modern greenhouse was a cultural center as well as an agricultural and horticultural space. This paper explores early manifestations of botanical conservatories in which far-off landscapes and climates could be brought near: for pleasure, to mark social status, and/or for scientific study.
Paper long abstract:
In the Renaissance, growing exotic fruits such as oranges was reserved for the wealthy who could afford to shelter their citrus trees in orangeries. These large outbuildings were either fitted with wooden shutters that opened during the day or with glass doors that faced south to protect trees from winter cold. As "orangeries" became more elaborate buildings with glass-ceilings and heating systems, plant conservatories further displayed wealth and influence. The influx of plant specimens collected on voyages beginning in the fifteenth century through the colonial explorations of the nineteenth-century steamers spurred the study of live plants in European centers such as Paris, London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Vienna. Greenhouses in India, the West Indies, and North American likewise were built to grow, study, and appreciate a wide diversity of temperate, tropical, desert, and alpine plants. These conservatories were influential in locating Europe and North America as centralizing metropoles against a plethora of supposedly peripheral places. Greenhouses and conservatories revealed the growing importance of colonial possessions and offered a physical space in which to contemplate a more intimate sense of global colonial power and connection. Through the lens of the greenhouse, one can trace networks of exchange that illuminate the development of an increasingly diverse and interconnected natural world. This paper begins with an examination of Olivier de Serres’ Le Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1605) and draws on other texts, images, and archival records, to examine the role of greenhouses in plant exchanges and colonial imaginations before 1700.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the geography of falconry between the European middle ages and the dawn of exploration over the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, as it expanded (and came to adapt) to new physical as well as cultural landscapes.
Paper long abstract:
The human practice of taming wild birds of prey with the aim of assisting individuals and communities in the hunt for food dates back for several millennia. Over time, falconry became a staple of various small-scale economic systems. Significantly, it also came to acquire strong cultural implications. By the European middle ages, it had spread out fully across the continent and was subject to strict sets of social norms. Hardly used for subsistence anymore, medieval falconry was a privilege of the elites, itself a symbol of status, power, wealth and social privilege. This paper looks at the geography of falconry between the European middle ages and the dawn of exploration over the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, as it expanded (and came to adapt) to new physical as well as cultural landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
I explore the domination-based theory of natural and societal history of the early modern Spanish historian Jerónimo Román y Zamora. I argue that his historical typology is influenced by a misunderstanding of non-Western forms of interacting and relating with the environment.
Paper long abstract:
The early modern period saw the emergence of novel intellectual manners for Iberian historians intended to integrate the histories of human societies and their immediate natural environments, especially as European societies commenced to interact with the Americas. However, most scholarship on the early modern Iberian intellectual treatment of this relationship has often solely focused on the works of few scholars like Bartolomé De las Casas and has ignored other original contemporaneous scholars and the relationships between said scholars and other non-Western forms of knowledge which began to permeate the Iberian intellectual world. In this paper, I analyze one such scholar’s conceptualization of the relationship between the natural environment and human development by focusing on the early modern work Repúblicas del Mundo written by the Spanish historian Jerónimo Román y Zamora. I highlight that Román’s discussion on the relationship between the natural environment and the development of human societies implies a direct correlation between the domination of nature by men and the overall moral and civilizational advancement of a society. Furthermore, I how this domination-based historical typology is constituted by misunderstood non-Western manners of relating with the environment consumed by the Iberian intellectual world during its encounter with Indigenous societies in the Americas. I conclude by underscoring how early modern European historical intellectual frameworks of conceptualizing the relationship between the natural environment and human societies, some of which continue to echo in today’s world, were created as a result of the intermingling of Western and non-Western environmental views during early modernity.