Landscapes And Environments Of The Middle Ages

Download or read book Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England written by Tom Williamson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of England's regional cultures are here shown to be strongly influenced by the natural environment and geographical features. The Anglo-Saxon period was crucial in the development of England's character: its language, and much of its landscape and culture, were forged in the period between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. Historians and archaeologists have long been fascinated by its regional variations, by the way in which different parts of the country displayed marked differences in social structures, settlement patterns, and field systems. In this controversial and wide-ranging study, the author argues that such differences were largely a consequence of environmental factors: of the influence of climate, soils and hydrology, and of the patterns of contact and communication engendered by natural topography. He also suggests that such environmental influences have been neglected over recent decades by generations of scholars who are embedded in an urban culture and largely divorced from the natural world; and that an appreciation of the fundamental role of physical geography in shaping human affairs can throw much new light on a number of important debates about early medieval society. The book will be essential reading for all those interestedin the character of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian settlements, in early medieval social and territorial organization, and in the origins of the England's medieval landscapes. Tom Williamson is Professor of LandscapeHistory, University of East Anglia; he has written widely on landscape archaeology, agricultural history, and the history of landscape design.

Download or read book Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages written by Michael Bintley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive introduction to the landscapes of the Middle Ages within and beyond Europe, paying close attention to the relationship between ‘real’ and imagined landscapes and the ways that medieval people made and inhabited their world. Rather than studying 'nature' in the Middle Ages, the book instead examines the spaces that people constructed through soil, stone, and song; water and wasteland; plants and animals; and timber, textiles, and texts, which in turn made up the medieval world. Likewise, the text emphasises a definition of environment that focuses on ‘living with’, inviting readers to think about the more-than-human worlds that medieval people depended on, cared for, constructed, and damaged. Bringing together a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, the book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of this period and considers the role that these medieval worlds have played in shaping the modern, both physically and culturally. Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in medieval studies and history, offering interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational insights into this period of immense change and innovation.

Download or read book Negotiating the Landscape written by Ellen F. Arnold and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negotiating the Landscape explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined. Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived the nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources. They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to others who shared their landscape.

Download or read book Inventing Medieval Landscapes written by John Howe and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven essays in this volume offer diverse approaches to very different landscapes. Yet they agree in viewing medieval western European landscape as artifact, as territiry constructed by medieval people on several interrelated levels. By helping to articulate how places came to be managed, created, and imagined, they offer their readers a much better apprecitaion of what might be called a "deep ecology" of the Middle Ages. --introd.

Download or read book Landscape in Middle English Romance written by Andrew M. Richmond and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the Little Ice Age in Britain, Middle English romances provide a fascinating window into the worldviews of popular vernacular literature (and its audiences) at the close of the Middle Ages. Andrew M. Richmond shows how literary conventions of romances shaped and were in turn influenced by contemporary perspectives on the natural world. These popular texts also reveal widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of human actions and climate change. The natural world was a constant presence in the writing, thoughts, and lives of the audiences and authors of medieval English romance – and these close readings reveal that our environmental concerns go back further in our history and culture than we think.

Download or read book Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance written by Thomas Willard and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The environment--together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world--has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts, art works, and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies, ecotheology, and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches, the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned, the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy, chronicles from the New World, classical paintings from the Old World, and the plays of Shakespeare, the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today, even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today.

Download or read book Ecclesiastical Landscapes in Medieval Europe: an Archaeological Perspective written by José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo and published by Archaeopress Archaeology. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By presenting case studies from across Eastern and Western Medieval Europe, this volume aims to open up a Europe-wide debate on the variety of relations and contexts between ecclesiastical buildings and their surrounding landscapes between the 5th and 15th centuries AD.