Premodern Healthscaping

In May 2024, a multidisciplinary group of researchers conducted a geochemical survey in the Antas Valley, Iglesiente region, Sardinia, to explore the environmental (and health) impacts of a local silver-mining boom in the 12-14th centuries. See project details here.

We are pleased to share our first publication from this project. This survey is the third prospecting campaign of the area, with research conducted by Nicolas Minvielle Larousse and others since 2021.

This geochemical survey aimed to locate medieval metallurgical workshops, which, rather than mines per se, processed ores, and which would have left behind residues of metals that can be detected today in soils. As such, this project further lays the groundwork for a more extensive archaeological investigation of the area. We hope to identify, locate, and map the various processes of the metallurgy industry in medieval Sardinia, and connect this industry to regional economic and administrative centres, such as Pisa.

The publication is available Open Access:
Minvielle Larousse, N., E. Brodie, G. Geltner, H. Gopnik, F. Sanna, & C. Tomczyk, “Prospections géochimiques dans la vallée d’Antas (Sardaigne).” Bulletin archéologique des Écoles françaises à l’étranger (2024). Published online 22 October 2024, https://journals.openedition.org/baefe/11705. [Open Access]

Furthermore, are also very pleased to share a video, “Hiding in Plain Sight”, that summarises the project. The video outlines the importance of further research and the prominent (and understudied) impact of pre-industrial metallurgy on the environment. Special thanks to Daniel Italia-Prasad for editing this video, and the generous funding of Monash University’s Incubator Program. We encourage anybody to share this video to both academic and lay audiences.

Further Readings:

Minvielle Larousse, N., “Iglesias. Archéologie des entreprises minières. Campagne 2022.” Bulletin archéologique des Écoles françaises à l’étranger (2023). Published online 28 November 2023, http://journals.openedition.org/baefe/10144. [Open Access]

Tomczyk C., A. Bernat, J. Belmon & N. Minvielle Larousse, “Geochemical and Documentary Topography of a Medieval Silver Valley: Detection of Workshops and Identification of Their Function.” Archaeological Prospection (2024). Published online 17 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1002/arp.1963. [Open Access]

G. Geltner, “Ecological Impacts and Environmental Perceptions of Mining in Europe, 1200-1550: Preliminary Notes.” Parergon 40, no. 1 (2023): pp. 157-80. https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2023.a905418

As part of the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison (30 October – 2 November) Shireen Hamza will be presenting within the panel “New Approaches to the Study of Smell Culture in South Asia”.

Her paper is titled “Therapeutic Tastes and Salubrious Scents in Waterside Spaces”. Shireen Hamza forms part of our international team for the ARC Discovery Project, “Pursuing Public Health in the Pre-industrial World, 1100-1800”. How timely that she is presenting on the history and the study of smell culture! Our research group recently held a seminar to discuss the role of smell in public health. We shared insights based on both Shireen’s and Rose Byfleet‘s work, and discussed the work of Katelynn Robinson and James McHugh, the conflation in scholarship of terms miasma and (bad) odour (to be untangled!), and the renewed importance of appreciating smell in history.

Shireen will be presenting alongside Aditya Harchand (“Perfumes for the People: Snuffs, Sharbats, and Home Remedies in Colonial Tamil Nadu”), and Giti Datt (“Attar: Materials, Processes and Future”). The panel will be chaired by non other than James McHugh, whose work we as a team read and discussed only a week ago.

More information about the Conference Programme and other papers can be found here.

Image: Frontcover of McHugh, J. Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture. (Oxford University Press USA, 2012)

On 17-18 October, University of Siena’s Department of Historical Sciences and Cultural Heritage (Università di Siena, Dipartimento Scienze storiche e dei beni culturali) will host a conference on mining landscapes of medieval Italy: Paesaggi minerari dell’Italia medievale.

This exciting conference is spearheaded by Giovanna Bianchi, Associate Professor of Medieval Archaeology, and Luisa Dallai, head of the Laboratory of Topography of Mining Territories (LTTM), both at Università di Siena. Bianchi and Dallai work on the 2022-2026 ARC Discovery Project “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800“, which this website covers. This conference brings to the discussion new research on mining landscapes, the environment, health, and multidisciplinary methodological approaches to researching preindustrial mining.

See in particular papers by researchers across various projects , including Prof. Guy Geltner (Monash University), Nicholas Minvielle (INRAP LA3M, UMR 7298), Fabio C. Pinna (Università di Cagliari), and Mattia Sanna Montanelli (Università di Cagliari), and of course Giovanna Bianchi (Università di Siena) and Luisa Dallai ((Università di Siena).

For a closer view of the programme pdf, and more information, see here.

To follow the presentations, please see the Dipartimento di scienze storiche e dei beni culturali Youtube channel here.

On 22 August 2024, as part of the ARC Discovery Project research group, “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800”, we ran our first public event to share the research conducted in the two years of the project’s running. Our programme included presentations by all of our researchers minus one, plus a keynote speech from Professor Elizabeth Stephens at the University of Queensland.

The colloquium was a great success. Several participants attended both online and in-person, and came from a range of disciplines and places including religious history, the history of medicine and plague, and histories of colonialism and empire; a range of places including Sydney, Chicago, and Finland; and a range of career stages, including PhD students, Early Career Researchers, and leaders in the fields of public health and “healthscaping”. We look forward to further connecting with, and growing, our network and scholarship on preindustrial public health histories.

The presentations were records, and the videos will be able to be/ can be viewed under our Media > Videos tab.

This project, and colloquium, were generously funded by the Australian Research Council.

The MINESCAPES Summer School, which ran 1-9 June in the Harz ‘minescape’, has concluded with a great sense of satisfaction and inspiration for further cutting-edge research in mining and environmental history. The summer school included 13 PhD students working with researchers from around the world, scholars working on the history of science and technology, the history of mining ecology, the social and health histories of mining communities, and other areas.

The MINESCAPES Summer School, also titled “Socio-cultural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge in the Middles Ages and the Early Modern Period”, brought together researchers and students from the humanities and the natural sciences to collaborate across disciplines and to better understand human-environment assemblages, complexes, interactions, understandings, and legacies in the historic mining area of the Harz. The Rammelsberg Mine, the focus of the Summer School, has been mined for silver and copper since the 10th century CE.

There is much to be discovered and understood about “historicity of materials, processes, and bodily experience in specific environments—questions that are central not only to the history of science but to human-environmental relationships more broadly“. Mining, which included intense and back-breaking work both above and below the ground, pulling out precious metals from the Earth, is a perfect case study to better understand preindustrial approaches to the environment.

For 9 days, students and researchers straddled the disciplines of the humanities and the natural sciences. They visited the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, to study maps and rare books; tested water and soil; and visited underground shafts. Truly a combination of documentary, physical, and embodied learning. We hope that this is a starting point for a wealth of research on a multimethodological social, cultural, and environment history of mining and metallurgy.

The Summer School was generously funded by Volkswagen Stiftung, and culminates over a year of planning. Special thanks to Tina Asmussen, of the German Mining Museum in Bochum, and Pamela H. Smith, of Columbia University, for their organisation and for making this happen.

In May 2024, a multidisciplinary team of researchers carried out a geochemical landscape survey campaign in the Iglesiente historic mining region, in Sardinia. These included Guy Geltner, member for our ARC project, “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World”, as well as staff and students from Monash University, École français de Rome, and Università degli Studi di Cagliari, such as Nicolas Minvielle Larousse, Hilary Gopnik, Erin Brodie, and Céline Tomczyk. This project falls under our 2024 Incubator project funded by Monash University, “The Forgotten Silver Age of Sardinia: Miners, metallurgy and the environment in the Iglesias region, 12th-14th centuries” which aims to map the toxic legacies of preindustrial mining in Sardinia by locating the deposition of heavy metals. See more information on the project here, and a highlight of our photos here.

Megan Cassidy-Welch, of the University of Divinity, CI for our international research project “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World”, will present at Flinders University in Adelaide on 24 May. Her presentation focuses on the health practices of pilgrims as they travelled to the Holy Land. More information can be found here.

OVERVIEW 

• When: 11.15 – 12.30 (Melbourne local time)
• Where: Social Sciences South 149 (Bedford Park, SA) / Microsoft Teams

Abstract: 

This paper will explore some of the ways in which medieval pilgrims managed their health prior to and en route to the holy land at the time of the crusades. Using narrative accounts, sermons, letters and medical texts, I examine the management of spiritual and physical health during travel, particularly during the 12th and 13th centuries, to show the variety of healthcare knowledges and practices available to medieval travellers. Far from leaving their fate entirely in the hands of God as they set off on arduous and dangerous journeys, medieval pilgrims and crusaders possessed sophisticated understandings of preventive healthcare management that were mobilised throughout their travels. Such knowledges also reveal a complex interplay between physical and spiritual health. 

Dr. Aydogan Kars of Monash University will be presenting a paper on prophetic medicine at the religious history conference held at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 2024 April 4th-5th. The conference is titled “Between Reason and Authority. Diverse Paradigms of Doing Science in Pre-Modern Arabo-Islamic World“.

The full conference program can be found here.

Attendance type: Aydogan Kars will be presenting online from Melbourne.
Time: Session 2 begins at 14.20 Warsaw local time // 23:20 Melbourne local time.

Abstract:
“Prophetic medicine” [al-ṭibb al-nabawī], refers to a large body of independent
works that typically collected the traditions [ḥadīths] on health and medicine attributed to
the Prophet Muḥammad. Increasingly bringing the prophetic traditions together with the
Greco-Indo-Arabic medical literature, the prophetic medicine literature embodied a site of
pedagogical ambivalence and change. Were these works studied in the traditional pedagogy
of the transmitted [naqlī] sciences, or that of the rationalist [ʿaqlī] sciences? In this
presentation, I will focus on the early prophetic medicine literature in order to analyze the
relationship between the evolving content of these works and the pedagogies adopted by
their authors and teachers. I will also elaborate on the cultural and socio-political impact of
these changing pedagogies, reflected in the major institutional transformations in Islamicate
medical learning in the thirteenth century.

Bio:
Aydogan Kars is a Senior Researcher in Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Monash
University in Australia. His first book, titled Unsaying God (OUP, 2019), focused on negative
theological trends in the medieval Islamicate world. His second book, ʿUmar Suhrawardī (d.
1234) (Brill, 2022), is a collection of original editions and English translations of twelve
Arabic and Persian works on mysticism and theology penned by a prominent medieval
mystic and the eponym of a Sufi order. Aydogan’s primary research field is medieval Islamic
thought. Here you can find an updated list of Aydogan’s publications:
http://monash.academia.edu/aydogankars

Participation Note:
Aydogan is based in Melbourne, which will be 9 hours ahead of the
Warsaw time during April 2024. It will be difficult for him to participate any session after
4pm in Warsaw time.