| Abstract | Paper -a:
Rodulfus Glaber was an 11th-century monk, who had an exceptionally adventurous life. He was sent away from several monasteries so that he had to travel around Burgundy several times. These adventures are partly included in his work, the Historiarum libri quinque. The aim of the paper is to present the geographical view of Glaber, and understand why he had such a deep interest in the elements of nature, why does he refer to natural phenomenon more frequently than the contemporaneous chroniclers do.
Paper -b:
When did Europeans first experience the sense of racial, as distinct from religious, superiority that has pervaded both human experience and the world order over, possibly, the last 550 years? My paper seeks answers to this question by exploring the narratives and letters of European travellers - merchants, crusaders, pilgrims, envoys, and missionaries - who ventured beyond Europe during roughly the 12th and 13th centuries. I discuss the perceptions they recorded of the real people they saw and met, and what these reveal to us of contemporary attitudes within Europe.
Paper -c:
Current conditions are not the first historical instance of human beings experiencing rapid climate change, nor is the range of contemporary attitudes towards nature unusual. This paper will present a socio-rhetorical analysis of late medieval British perceptions of the environment as they developed during the early part of the period currently referred to as the Little Ice Age. A range of explicit descriptions of the changing natural world, metaphors and metonymies involving nature and the limits of representation, among other elements, will be assessed in selected texts from 1250-1500, with an emphasis on the works of natural philosophers. A summary of the impact of late medieval climate change on British intangible culture of the period will be essayed.
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