IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1333: Environment in the Middle Ages: Crisis, Transitions, and Collapses?
Wednesday 3 July 2024, 16:30-18:00
| Sponsor: | Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur Public (SHMESP) |
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| Organiser: | Claire Soussen, Histoire, les Langues, les Littératures et l'Interculturel (HLLI - UR 4030), Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale |
| Moderator/Chair: | Dominique Stutzmann, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (IRHT), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris |
| Paper 1333-a | Thinking Respect for Nature in the 12th Century: Adelard of Bath's Contradictions (Language: English) Index terms: Islamic and Arabic Studies, Language and Literature - Latin and Philosophy |
| Paper 1333-b | Agrarian Growth and Environmental Change from an Ecosystem Perspective, 12th-14th Centuries (Language: English) Index terms: Archaeology - General, Economics - Rural, Economics - Urban and Language and Literature - French or Occitan |
| Paper 1333-c | Animal Disease and Awareness of Crisis in the Early Middle Ages (Language: English) Index terms: Archaeology - General, Economics - Rural and Language and Literature - Latin |
| Abstract | As last year's conference organized by the SHMESP (French Medievalists Society) on the "Environment and societies" (program) has demonstrated, the environment is now a well-established theme in the community of medievalists. But, at the very time when it was part of the research themes, it took an increasing place in the lives of our contemporaries, marked by the themes of the climate crisis, now evident, of the ecological transition, essential but if long time to come, and possible collapse. Even if historians are not yet invited to expert committees, their subjects now feature among the information discussed in debates on global warming. The medieval world is regularly evoked, not only because of the increasing of temperatures which marks the "small medieval optimum" or the cooling of the "little ice age", but also as a scene of the collapse of the ancient world, or as an image of resilience in the face of the pandemic of 1348. In 2005, the geographer and political scientist Jared Diamond made the Viking establishment in Greenland one of the figures of the collapse, in an important book. In the last two decades, the medieval world, placed in a global and long-term perspective, has been the subject of multiple rereadings, which are, with exceptions (Bruce Campbell, Jean-Pierre Devroey), the work of non-historians. This session questions the relationship between humans and nature and explores their theories, narratives, and notions concerning the environment, its changes, and its crises, with the question: in what perspective do we situate the environmental history of medieval societies: collapses, transitions or crisis? F. Guizard will distinguish between animal disease, epizootics and the notion of crisis in the early Middle Ages. M. Arnoux will highlight how medieval people perceived the change and transformations undergone by ecosystems, particularly animal populations. O. Hanne will explore the philosophical evolution of Adelard of Bath from a Neoplatonic perspective to a hegemonic approach in which humans dominate nature by technical means. |