IMC 2021: Sessions

Greatly dependent on their natural environment, people of pre-modern Europe were highly vulnerable to its sudden changes. While these changes were usually perceived as justifiable and deserved godly wrath, people of the time devised various ways to neutralise its effects. This session explores societal responses to the impacts of extreme environmental processes in late-medieval and early-modern Central and South-eastern Europe. During the Middle Ages and the early-modern period, these regions were frequently seen as borderlands between the continent's East and West and rural, somewhat 'forgotten' peripheries. The session's key focus is on societal institutes and devices which the people of these areas used to respond and adapt themselves to the risks which the nature put before them. By comparatively following diverse experiences of handling famine, flood, infectious diseases, and other environmental disasters, the session draws a map of the region's social abilities to efficiently manage environmental crisis, by which community cohesion, collective sense of place and notions of common belonging were constructed and transferred to the modern mentalities.