This week, Guy Geltner will present at Monash University, “The Nature of Extraction in Preindustrial Europe”, highlighting his research on miners in preindustrial Europe.
OVERVIEW (More details here)
- When: 12.00-13.00 (Melbourne local time), 25 August 2023
- Where: Menzies Building, Monash University Clayton Campus
*For Zoom link and room details, please email sarahmay.comley@monash.edu
Abstract: As mining burgeoned across Europe from the thirteenth century on, the sector’s promoters and observers had to contend with resource management in a new key. Ore extraction differed in scale and scope from traditional practices of agriculture and animal husbandry. It was also more visibly destructive and by many accounts impacted the health of people, animals, soils and crops. But did the era’s cultural responses to landscape change amount to an environmental turn or a secularization of Creation, a phenomenon scholars tend to associate with modernization? As this paper will argue, tracing early mining history can be inspired by environmental history while challenging some of its conventions.
Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555)
