Ecology and biodiversity in medieval Europe
After completing my thesis on the wolf, I have been intvestigating the diversity of changing human responses to animals and their environments in medieval Europe. The approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on archaeology, art-history and written sources as well as analogues from ecology, ethology and anthropology. The aim is to present the results in a single monograph (Dominion, see below), although a few papers focusing on various aspects of the topic have already been published (see below).
The leading monographs (e.g. Salisbury 1994) and collections of papers (e.g. Berlioz and de Beaulieu 1999) on medieval animals are predominantly concerned with written sources, to a lesser extent art, and barely touch on topics such as ecology, habitat and biological profiling. Whilst there is typically little attempt at integrating humans, animals and their co-habited physical and conceptual environments, these are without doubt all bold and important efforts at furthering our understanding of medieval human-animal relations – they are essential foundations for all future research. Aside from the handful of generalised overviews, the majority of studies on medieval animals are extremely specialised – focusing almost exclusively on faunal assemblages, individual artefacts such as bestiaries and hunting manuals or detailed themes such as fur trading and shape shifting (Pluskowski 2002). The importance of animals in virtually every aspect of medieval life cannot be underestimated, yet awareness of fauna and their related environments is typically limited and somewhat clichéd in the wider field of medieval studies. Therefore a fresh and accessible interdisciplinary study exploring the range of potential research avenues is long overdue.
This study will not produce a gazetteer of every excavated faunal assemblage, hunting charter or bestial sculpture, but rather aims to identify dynamic trends in responses to animals from a range of different social contexts, across a series of contrasting environments and how these changed over time. Rather than compiling a series of disjointed examples, the integrated approach focusing on specific environmental case studies in a limited study area will present a coherent survey of comparable and contrasting trends, accompanied by detailed analyses. The ultimate aim is to provide the first interdisciplinary framework of human-animal relations in the medieval Europe, highlighting avenues for future research. In this respect, this proposed study is pioneering and will, if successful, appeal to a range of academic audiences from archaeologists, historians and art-historians through to those engaged in historical reconstruction. The study will also provide the first holistic reference work on the subject for students of medieval archaeology, history, literature and art-history, as well as a detailed, comparable text for those engaged in faunal/environmental research and study in other eras and cultures.
References
Berlioz, J. and Polo de Beaulieu, M.-A. (eds.) (1999). L’animal exemplaire au Moyen Åge, Ve-XVe siecles, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Pluskowski, A. G. (2002). ‘Hares with crossbows and rabbit bones: integrating physical and conceptual studies of medieval fauna’, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 18, pp. 153-182.
Salisbury, J. E. (1994). The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, New York and London, Routledge.
|