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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Moore
(University of Waterloo)
Ellen Arnold (The Ohio State University)
Colin Coates (Glendon College, York University)
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- Chair:
-
Richard Hoffmann
(York University, Toronto)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Deeper Histories, Diverse Sources, Different Narratives
- Location:
- Room 8
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on how increasingly powerful and centralized institutions transformed local medieval environments. We seek papers from a range of environmental themes and geographical areas that examine how the intersection of individuals and institutions transformed the medieval landscape.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on how the unprecedented growth of increasingly powerful and centralized institutions during the Middle Ages (c. 500 – 1500 CE) transformed local environments. These institutions, both secular and religious, functioned in many ways like national or even multinational corporations. The reach and priorities of these corporate bodies, in increasingly urbanized and centralized economies, extended far into their hinterlands. Control over spaces, including the natural resources therein, became paramount to the hegemonic control over environments. Such institutional priorities differed from — and often conflicted with — the wants and needs of local communities and individuals. Customary practices gradually became eroded in the face of systematic written regulations, though not without significant cultural change and social tension. Waterways, woodlands, arable fields, and other ecological spaces all became arenas for the negotiation of power and responsibility over the natural world. All of this socioeconomic interplay, furthermore, occurred in the midst of regionally significant climatic changes, as the cold and volatile post-Roman climate (c. 500 – 800) became relatively warm, dry, and stable during the Medieval Warm Period (c. 800 – 1300), and then shifted back into colder, wetter, and more volatile conditions during the onset of the Little Ice Age (c. 1300 – 1850).
We seek papers from a broad range of environmental themes and geographical areas from any perspective that examine how the intersection of individuals and institutions between 500 and 1500 CE transformed the medieval landscape.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will reveal correlations between land reclamation in England's Fens and the success of St Guthlac’s cult. Using Esri's ArcGIS StoryMap technologies, it will plot changes to boundaries, estate ownership, and church construction between the 8th-16th centuries.
Paper long abstract:
The Anglo-Latin Vita Sancti Guthlaci by Felix explains that St Guthlac (ca.656-714) chose to seclude himself at Crowland for two reasons: he had been influenced by hearing tales of the Desert Fathers and Crowland was part of illius vastissimi heremi inculta loca called the Fens, uninhabitable because of demons and known to very few. Reconsideration of Crowland’s historical topography will illuminate how this site was chosen for its border location, as a site for ascetic living, healing, and prophesy, encouraged by royal patrons and popular with the laity.
Felix was clearly interested in imitating contemporary hagiographical exemplars circulating in Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh and eighth centuries. However, he was also interested in defining a local, Christianized landscape whose transformation mirrored that of his subject. Indeed, Benedictine monks transformed the isolated hermitage into a cult centre managed by a large monastic estate after the mid-tenth century, utilizing Felix’s narrative to endorse their ancient claims to a sanctified topography.
This presentation aims to explore, using Esri’s ArcGIS StoryMap technologies, the correlations between land reclamation in the Fens and the success of St Guthlac’s cult. It will demonstrate how changes to boundaries, estate ownership, and church construction may be plotted in StoryMaps to highlight the extent to which this Benedictine community at Crowland and its landscape remained intertwined from the eighth century through to its dissolution in the sixteenth century.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the agricultural policy of the Qa’an (or, great Qan) ulus (AKA, the Yuan dynasty) in the Mongol empire, especially encouraged by Qubilai Qa’an (r. 1260-1294), who pursued harmony between the nomadism of the grasslands and the farming economy of the China Proper.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the agricultural policy of the Qa’an (or, great Qan) ulus (AKA, the Yuan dynasty) in the Mongol empire, especially encouraged by Qubilai Qa’an (r. 1260-1294), who pursued harmony between the nomadism of the grasslands and the farming economy of the China Proper. The paper discovers the Mongols’ methods and achievements in building a new ecological space and life environment in the medieval age.
The Mongol great Qan’s agricultural policy greatly transformed the imperial dining table, natural landscape, and palace landscape. The great Qan introduced the imperial agricultural administration to organize peasants and to encourage agriculture and paid much attention to reconstructing the ecological environment. One major activity was tree planting. The Mongols and their livestock caused tension on crops and trees in farmland and cities in China and elsewhere. The seasonal migration of the great Qan from Dadu (or, Khanbaliq, present-day Beijing) to Shangdu (present-day Zhenglan qi, Inner Mongolia) to the north was in harmony with planting seeds and protecting livestock and crops. This was a new imperial landscape in the Qa’an ulus under the Mongols, where people, livestock, and crops competed and coexisted.
In short, the great Qan’s agricultural policy was closely linked to the taxation, economy, and ecological environment in the empire.
Paper short abstract:
Late medieval wetlands were sites of conflict between migratory settlement and powerful monastic institutions seeking to reformulate the landscape to fulfil religious and economic visions. Combining archaeological and written records offers new perspectives on these spaces of fluid negotiation.
Paper long abstract:
In late medieval England, fertile estuarine wetlands became sites of conflict between long-established modes of migratory settlement and increasingly powerful monastic institutions with their own conceptions of order, usefulness, and productivity. This paper examines how two communities of Augustinian canons contributed to the transformation of wetlands into dry land, including the priories of Bilsington (Romney Marsh, Kent) and Burscough (West Lancashire Coastal Plain). With varying success, each institution attempted to impose fixed legal and economic frameworks onto fluid and constantly changing landscapes. This was based on a comprehension of an immovable land-sea binary upheld by natural law and embodied in texts such as the Bible and Augustine of Hippo’s Literal Meaning of Genesis (415). Installing complex drainage systems, therefore, was akin to an act of creation, neatly separating water from land in previously liminal landscapes.
For a fuller understanding than previous studies, the reclamation process must be charted through documentary and archaeological sources. At Bilsington, rentals and charters are combined with a geophysical survey allowing reconstruction of previously lost field and drainage systems. At both priories, reclamation was top-down and institutionally driven. Certainly, within geographies devoid of stable natural features, individual tenants had little voice in the demarcation of property rights. Burscough Priory, for instance, used crosses as legal reference points creating a sacred landscape which expressed their seigneurial power. Hence, in transitory wetlands, individuals had an inherent disadvantage over organised, well-resourced institutions able to reformulate the environment to fulfil their own religious and economic visions.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents the conflicts for forests and pastures between communities and feudal lords in the Primiero fiefdom in a crucial phase of the transformation of the local environment due to pressure over natural resources caused by the mining expansion and the rise of the timber trade (1429-1586).
Paper long abstract:
In the transition between Medieval and Early Modern times, the princely county of Tyrol (under Habsburg sovereignty) experienced an excellent mining expansion in the north. At the same time, in the south, the rise of the timber trade solidified links between Alpine environments and outlet cities (particularly Venice). Advances in mining techniques and using facilities for flotation significantly increased the pressure on nature. Interest in controlling these natural resources resulted in conflicts for rights of enjoyment over forests and pastures between communities and feudal lords. The paper presents the case of the Primiero fiefdom (currently in Trentino, Italy) and the struggle between the villages and the feudal lords, the Welsperg, to control the commons and the tax revenue from the timber trade. This conflictual phase (1429-1454) allows us to observe the practices implemented by the communities to defend the natural heritage and the strategies of the feudal lords to erode the rights of the inhabitants. In the following period, the consolidation of the Habsburg Empire and the emergence of a mining administration (1477) interested in the exploitation of the mines of this valley shows the policies of transformation of the local environment put into practice with precise forest ordinances (1541, 1558, 1586), implemented by increasingly powerful and centralized institutions.
Paper short abstract:
Flight to the mountains as a response to invasion is a familiar trope in literature on the Balkans. More recently, a changing environment has been suggested. This paper will consider the evidence for and the reasons behind movement between elevations in the late medieval and early modern Balkans.
Paper long abstract:
In his The Waning of the Mediterranean, Faruk Tabak proposed a bold narrative of a change across the entire Mediterranean basin in the seventeenth century: "The shift in the epicenter of the basin’s economic life from its lower altitudes to its higher elevations was therefore a momentous change, and represented a dramatic departure from the landscape the region presented to the traveler in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." In my paper I will engage with this thesis, something that environmental historians have yet to do. Although the book was widely admired, Tabak was also criticized for verging on environmental determinism by failing to take into account politics and local variation. In my paper I will do just that, through a focused treatment of Ottoman Thessaly, going back to the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and continuing up through the crisis of the seventeenth century that Tabak is referencing. With its wide plains surrounded by towering mountains, Thessaly is the ideal location for considering the relationship between the mountain and the plain in the context of both a change in sovereignty and a new religious landscape, as Muslims from Anatolia settled the Thessalian plain. Drawing on existing studies, my paper will also bring in examples from other parts of the Ottoman Empire to demonstrate the complexity of the strategy of what I am calling verticality.