The field of medieval environmental history has grown immensely from its inception 30 years ago. While scholars of the classical past and modern period registered environmental changes made by their powerful states a little earlier, the topic caught on more slowly in the medieval field, where small and ineffective states posed different methodological challenges. It took different ways of studying nature to see how environments changed in Europe and the Mediterranean during the millennium between 500 and 1500 CE. Scholars of the medieval environment of necessity adopted an acrobatic approach to the past, bringing together the usual tools of the historian -- close textual analysis – with archaeology, archaeobotany, and scientific studies of pollen distribution, weather patterns, and the contents of middens. Today, the field of medieval environmental history represents one of the most methodologically diverse and inventive among any branch of history.


This one-day conference, with an opening session on the previous afternoon, will appraise the major developments and turning points of the last 30 years in medieval environmental history with papers from some of the leading scholars in the field. Since one of the pioneers in medieval environmental history, Paolo Squatriti, has been on the faculty of the U of M for 25 years, the conference will take cues from his seminal works and methodological turns. Panels will offer papers within the following themes: 1. History in the mundane 2. Historical agency and unexpected actors 3. The Mediterranean as a place of hybridity 4. Materiality and the past 5. Science in the service of history.

Featuring:
Jon Arnold (University of Tulsa)
Henrik Dey (Hunter College)
Hussein Fancy (Yale University)
Benjamin Graham (University of Memphis)
Richard Hoffman (York University)
Alyssa Kotva (The Ohio State University)
Jamie Kreiner (University of California, Los Angeles)
Stephanie Leitzel (Cornell University)