Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface
- Frontispiece: Nature and culture at Waterford, Ireland, 1372
- Introduction: Thinking about medieval Europeans in their natural world
- 1 Long no wilderness
- 2 Intersecting instabilities: culture and nature at medieval beginnings, c.400–900
- 3 Humankind and God’s Creation in medieval minds
- 4 Medieval land use and the formation of traditional European landscapes
- 5 Medieval use, management, and sustainability of local ecosystems, 1: primary biological production sectors
- 6 Medieval Use, management, and sustainability of local ecosystems, 2: interactions with the non-living environment
- 7 ‘This belongs to me . . .’
- 8 Suffering the uncomprehended: disease as a natural agent
- 9 An inconstant planet, seen and unseen, under foot and overhead
- 10 A slow end of medieval environmental relations
- Afterword
- A sampler for further reading
- Index
- References
Introduction: Thinking about medieval Europeans in their natural world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface
- Frontispiece: Nature and culture at Waterford, Ireland, 1372
- Introduction: Thinking about medieval Europeans in their natural world
- 1 Long no wilderness
- 2 Intersecting instabilities: culture and nature at medieval beginnings, c.400–900
- 3 Humankind and God’s Creation in medieval minds
- 4 Medieval land use and the formation of traditional European landscapes
- 5 Medieval use, management, and sustainability of local ecosystems, 1: primary biological production sectors
- 6 Medieval Use, management, and sustainability of local ecosystems, 2: interactions with the non-living environment
- 7 ‘This belongs to me . . .’
- 8 Suffering the uncomprehended: disease as a natural agent
- 9 An inconstant planet, seen and unseen, under foot and overhead
- 10 A slow end of medieval environmental relations
- Afterword
- A sampler for further reading
- Index
- References
Summary
How much were medieval Italians themselves responsible for the food shortage that by late spring 1347 was affecting about half the population of Tuscany, for the onset that summer in Sicily and Genoa of an epidemic which would in a few years kill half or more of the European population, or for the buildings smashed and hundreds of deaths in Venice and further northeast in an earthquake of January 1348? Ought those events be related to unsurpassed flooding across central Europe in July 1342, and the crash of English grain yields to 40 per cent of normal in 1348–52?
Did the spread of an exotic animal, the rabbit, in thirteenth-century England and the Low Countries have anything to do with the simultaneous extirpation of native wild boar from Britain? And the arrival of an exotic fish, the common carp, in France at the very time that native salmon were vanishing from streams of coastal Normandy? Was any of this change to biodiversity connected to medieval classification of the beaver as a fish?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Environmental History of Medieval Europe , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014