The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability
By Annette Kehnel
Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 9781684582433
Can we learn from people in the Middle Ages when it comes to living sustainably? This book examines topics such as recycling, microfinance and minimalism to show how the medieval world offers lessons to the modern one.
Excerpt:
In what follows, I shall concentrate on the pre-modern era, the period immediately preceding the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. ‘Pre-modern’ is a tricky concept, because it divides history into the modern – i.e. ‘us’ – and all that went before – i.e. ‘them’. This is not a particularly helpful distinction, especially when you consider that ‘pre-modern’ is supposed to encompass more than 300,000 years of human history; so we’ll try to avoid the term.
Our focus will be on the more than two millennia that preceded industrialisation, stretching from Greek antiquity (the fifth century BC) to the Enlightenment (the eighteenth century). Most of my examples come from the high to late Middle Ages, that is, roughly from the 1000s to the 1500s, and from societies and economies based in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – because the Mediterranean was an economic nerve centre in those days, they were to an extent considered a cultural and economic whole. The advantage of this is that the people who lived in that region during this period left behind a comparatively large volume of written material, granting us unexpectedly detailed insights into their lives and conceptual world, which allow us to reconstruct pre-modern takes on economic norms, theories and practices.
Who is this book for?
Aimed at socially and environmentally-conscious readers, this book details how medieval people lived in ways that were surprisingly sustainable. There are many topics here – economic, social, religious, environmental, agricultural – that historians will find to be worthwhile reading.
The Author
Annette Kehnel is the chair of medieval history at the University of Mannheim in Germany.
The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability
By Annette Kehnel
Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 9781684582433
Can we learn from people in the Middle Ages when it comes to living sustainably? This book examines topics such as recycling, microfinance and minimalism to show how the medieval world offers lessons to the modern one.
Excerpt:
In what follows, I shall concentrate on the pre-modern era, the period immediately preceding the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. ‘Pre-modern’ is a tricky concept, because it divides history into the modern – i.e. ‘us’ – and all that went before – i.e. ‘them’. This is not a particularly helpful distinction, especially when you consider that ‘pre-modern’ is supposed to encompass more than 300,000 years of human history; so we’ll try to avoid the term.
Our focus will be on the more than two millennia that preceded industrialisation, stretching from Greek antiquity (the fifth century BC) to the Enlightenment (the eighteenth century). Most of my examples come from the high to late Middle Ages, that is, roughly from the 1000s to the 1500s, and from societies and economies based in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – because the Mediterranean was an economic nerve centre in those days, they were to an extent considered a cultural and economic whole. The advantage of this is that the people who lived in that region during this period left behind a comparatively large volume of written material, granting us unexpectedly detailed insights into their lives and conceptual world, which allow us to reconstruct pre-modern takes on economic norms, theories and practices.
Who is this book for?
Aimed at socially and environmentally-conscious readers, this book details how medieval people lived in ways that were surprisingly sustainable. There are many topics here – economic, social, religious, environmental, agricultural – that historians will find to be worthwhile reading.
The Author
Annette Kehnel is the chair of medieval history at the University of Mannheim in Germany.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website.
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