Premodern Healthscaping

Next week Wednesday 13 September, Guy Geltner will present at Melbourne University as part of its HSP (History of Philosophy and Science) Seminar Series.

OVERVIEW 

• When: 12.00(Melbourne local time), 13 September 2023
• Where: Old Arts 155, The University of Melbourne

Paulus Vanius (1495) Judicium Jovis frontispiece

Abstract: This talk will present ongoing research on metal-ore mining in “preinustrial” Europe (c. 1200-1600) mainly from a social, cultural and environmental-health perspective. It examines how, following the so-called medieval mining boom of the later 12th century, new technologies and labor- and environmental hazards emerged, which communities across Europe had to contend with. In doing so they drew on, created and disseminated knowledge about Nature (or Creation) that was both innovative and conservative. Historians of science tended to attribute these forms of knowledge to Humanism and the Scientific Revolution, yet its roots and practice appear to be centuries earlier. The key to unlocking these developments, however, lies in being able to work across historical and archaeological methods, which is not always an easy path, due to the growing gap in these fields’ epistemologies.

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)

We have released a photo gallery of 2023 summer fieldwork in Rocca San Silvestro, to be found in Media > Photo Gallery. A description follows, written by anthropologist and team member Serena Viva, who worked on site:

Serena showing to Rose the bone pathologies in the bioarchaeological laboratory in Villa Lanzi.

From the 3rd to the 14th of July a geochemical research campaign, carried out by the Department of History and Cultural Heritage, University of Siena, took place in the Archaeological mines park of San Silvestro. The team, guided by Professor Luisa Dallai (responsible for the topography and mineral landscape remote-sensing laboratory) realised soil analyses with the aid of a portable XRF. The samples were taken from mineral extraction areas and in some of the medieval buildings of the burg, located within the walls of the medieval castle of San Silvestro, and in proximity of the coeval extraction mines. This challenging research will attempt to shed light on the dynamics of mineral exploitation, and it will locate the presence of pollutant metals and their level of contamination on the soil which may have compromised the health status of the community at the time.

Meanwhile, the Bioarcheology laboratory carried out by Serena Viva (anthropologist), Mauro Buonincontri (archaeobotanist), and Andrea Tommolini (zooarchaeologist), has had its first two weeks. Serena is analysing the human remains of men, women and children, recovered from past archaeological excavations. These villagers were buried between the XIII and XIV centuries AD in the small graveyard in front of the church. Mauro and Andrea are studying the macro plant remains and the animal bones in order to discover husbandry practices, agricultural production, and the food quality of the medieval community. The agricultural and forest habitat exploitation research will enable us to shed light onto the evolution and ecological changes derived from anthropic activities. The laboratory continued for the rest of July.

Luisa Dallai and her team using portable XRF in a mineral cave in Lanzi Valley.

The bio & geo research project name is “Miners” and it is part of the bigger international project, “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World”, which has the objective of studying modern age public healthcare. This study involves several universities from all around the world. Apart from the University of Siena (Italy), there are the Monash University of Melbourne (Australia), Australian Catholic University (Australia), Delhi University (India) and Leiden University (Netherlands). Each one of those will study different communities.

Meeting at the Archaeological Mines Park of San Silvestro: from the left, Monash University Phd candidate Rose Byfleet, zooarchaeologist Andrea Tommolini, anthropologist Serena Viva, and archaeobotanist Mauro Buonincontri of the University of Siena.

A photo gallery of the work, the people, and the collaborations can be found in our Media -> Photo Gallery page.

As part of our years-long research track spanning two key research projects on premodern/ preindustrial health (About Us), we provide a bibliography of “The History of Public Health in Pre-Industrial Societies”. It is constantly updated, but our last revision was in early 2022.

We’d like to open up the updating of our bibliography to fellow scholars and people who can contribute works we haven’t heard of. We have opened a Google Doc with our current bibliography, which we will be adding to. Concurrently, we invite anyone to make their own suggestions or additions – all users with access to the link have commenting privileges, which means you can make suggestions and comments for resources directly onto the document.

We will close this access on 30 September, to compile all suggestions, and republish our updated bibliography on the website and socials.

Contribute to the bibliography here.

We have set up a Mastodon account and aim to transition slowly into this federated, non-profit platform. Mastodon focuses on users’ privacy and collective governance.

Our platform is on the Humanities Commons server, which has been hosting our project portal since 2018:
https://hcommons.social/@prosanitate. 

For now we will simultaneously post on both X/Twitter and Mastodon, but hope to move our focus to the latter.

See you there!

Organised by Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch (Australian Catholic University) this symposium explores the ‘medieval body’ as a site of critical inquiry, through three ongoing research projects of disparate focuses: ‘Literature and the Face’; ‘Queer Medievalism’ and our very own project, ‘Pursuing Public Health in the Pre-industrial World’.

OVERVIEW (More details here)

• When: 09.30 (Melbourne local time), 17 August 2023
• Where: Teresa of Kolkota Building, 115 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy

*Register for both online and in-person attendance by emailing julie.carpenter@acu.edu.au

Check out the Twitter profiles of the three projects @ProSanitate @LiteratureFace @Queer_Medieval
It's going to be an excellent conversation! https://t.co/wQ2MfK5FmV

— Megan Cassidy-Welch (@mcassidywelch) August 1, 2023

Flyer Medieval bodies symposium 17_8_23

Workshop: Workers’ Health and Material Environment in Port Cities (1300-1700)

Organised by Dr. C.V. Weeda (Leiden University) and Marie-Louise Leonard (University Ca’ Foscari Venezia), this workshop includes three of our fabulous team: Claire Weeda, Janna Coomans, and Léa Hermenault. The workshop explores ” how port cities and maritime recruits negotiated health policies in their different material environments and how representations of the material environment informed an understanding of workers’ different abilities.”

OVERVIEW (More details here)

• When: 09.25 (Amsterdam local time)
• Where: Huizinga Building, Leiden

*Register for online attendance by emailing c.v.weeda@hum.leidenuniv.nlprogram-workshop-workers-health-and-material-environment-leiden-university-22-june-2023

We are excited to announce we have received funding from Monash Arts Faculty for a Health and Medical Research Accelerator project on preindustrial public health.

This research project builds on the work done in our two (previous/ current) projects, Healthscaping Premodern Europe, and Pursuing Preindustrial Public Health, by exploring the environmental health of miners in preindustrial Europe.

Pollution and environmental health threats from mining are often seen as recent phenomena. Yet their history as a nexus dates back many centuries, with a particular acceleration in thirteenth-century Europe.

Woodcut from Georgius Agricolas “De re metallica libri XII”
Public domain

Europe experienced unprecedented demographic and economic growth between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, as well as an increase in industry and trade, all of which generated a need for metals and coinage. Mines and miners proliferated in an effort to exploit the region’s numerous ore deposits.

Extraction could last several centuries and fostered human settlement and economic growth, but it also threatened communities with pollution, deteriorated health and irreversible ecological changes. While mining products and their economic value are well known, miners’ health and extraction’s environmental impacts remain poorly understood, despite abundant evidence.

Our new project, which runs until the end of this year (thus the “Accelerator”), gathers researchers across disciplines including history and archaeology, to produce original and systematic comparison of three mining sites. We will compare:
1) short- and long-term medical and environmental consequences of Europe’s medieval mining boom; and
2) how mining communities understood and addressed such threats.

Map of known preindustrial mining sites in Europe 1200-1600, with our case studies identified in red.

The team will focus on the three mining regions of Brandes (France), Harz (Germany) and Colline Metallifere (Italy),  moving beyond the scale of single sites and (sub)disciplines, and towards a continental synthesis. Our project also has public engagement in mind: we will build a database of environmental and health data across these regions, and produce interactive maps visualising these comparisons. See our track record of historical GIS here.

The innovative pilot program will challenge the narrative of a single path to current environmental health threats, one that began namely with the Industrial Revolution in urban north-western Europe and culminated in a global Anthropocene.

Our research team consists, non-exhaustively, of the following researchers and research assistants based across western Europe; Australia; and Malaysia.

Guy Geltner (Monash University, Australia)
Léa Hermenault (Universiteit Antwerp, Belgium)
Nicolas Minvielle Larousse (Ecole française de Rome, Italy)
Giovanna Bianchi (Università di Siena, Italy)
Tina Asmussen (Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Germany)
Sarah May (Monash University, Australia)
Kallum Robinson (Monash University, Australia)

Lola Digard, member of our previous research project, Healthscaping Premodern Europe, will be in discussion with Jane Fontaine tomorrow. Dr Fontaine’s lecture focuses on the role of the Prague market in the trade of enslaved people.

14 February 2023, 3.30pm EST
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

The details for the event are here.

Speakers: Jane Fontaine, Lola Digard.

Guy Geltner will be presenting at The University of Melbourne’s Medieval Round Table discussion group on 6 February 2023. The Round Table is an informal forum that meets monthly, usually on the first Monday of the month, to discuss works in progress. It is open to all interested scholars and students.

When: 6:15pm local time (Melbourne Australia)

Where: University of Melbourne, Melbourne Australia OR Zoom

Further details via The University of Melbourne Medieval Roundtable Page.

The Nature of Extraction in Preindustrial Europe:

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.  This paper begins by exploring such emic accounts and how they differ from present-day ecological and biochemical explanations.  It then moves to ask whether the era’s documented cultural responses to mining-related 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.