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Environment and the Natural World

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Over the course of the early modern period, Europeans came to look at, engage with, and even transform nature and the environment in new ways, as they studied natural objects, painted landscapes, drew maps, built canals, cut down forests, and transferred species from one continent to another. The term “nature” meant many things during this period, from the inmost essence of something to those parts of the world that were nonhuman, such as the three famous “kingdoms” of nature: the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral. This article focuses on nature in this latter sense and broadens it out to include more recent understandings of the modern term “environment,” so as to encompass not only plants, animals, and rocks but also entire landscapes. Scholars from a wide variety of fields, ranging from the histories of science, art, and literature through historical geography, historical archeology, historical ecology, and landscape history, have long been interested in issues related to the environment and the natural world; more recently, they have been joined by practitioners of “environmental history” and additional branches of the environmental humanities and social sciences, who have drawn on these preexisting approaches and brought still further perspectives to the table.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. Quite a few authors have surveyed the history of attitudes toward the natural world; examples include the venerable Glacken 1967, Thomas 1983, and more recently Coates 1998. Others have used the concept of “landscape” as a lens, such as Schama 1995 and Whyte 2002. When it was first published, Merchant 1980 provided a pioneering interdisciplinary synthesis of the history of science, environmental history, and gender history, focusing specifically on the early modern period. Richards 2003 and Reith 2007 represent more recent attempts by environmental historians to bring together scholarship on the changes that affected the environment and the natural world during the early modern period.
  8.  
  9. Coates, Peter. Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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  11. Brief and readable chronologically organized survey of ideas about the natural world from ancient Greece and Rome onwards, with useful chapters on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
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  13. Glacken, Clarence J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
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  15. A giant, almost encyclopedic work which lays out in great detail many of the ideas that shaped Renaissance and Reformation thinking about the natural world. Excellent, though quite lengthy, multichapter sections on “The Christian Middle Ages” and “Early Modern Times.”
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  17. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.
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  19. A provocative work which argues that the early modern period overturned previous attitudes toward nature, far more respectful toward “Mother Earth,” in favor of activities like mining and land drainage which represented a far more active and domineering human attitude toward nature.
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  21. Pounds, N. J. G. “Renaissance Europe.” In An Historical Geography of Europe. By N. J. G. Pounds, 214–249. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  22. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572265.013Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  23. Surveys the state of European landscapes around 1500, with frequent helpful maps. Preceding and subsequent chapters also well worth reading.
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  25. Reith, Reinhold. Umweltgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007.
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  27. Offers an overview and detailed bibliography (mainly in German and English) of research to date on early modern European environments, with particular attention to themes such as climate and the “Little Ice Age,” natural catastrophes, epidemics, the forest, energy, the city, and sustainability and natural resources. Even those with no German reading ability may profitably consult the bibliography for its many English-language citations.
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  29. Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  31. Based on case studies from Europe and other regions, sets out the view that the early modern period was a time of intensified human land use; biological invasions linked to increasing human mobility; widespread depletion of larger animals, birds, and marine mammals; and, more generally, increasing scarcity and uncertainty.
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  33. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf, 1995.
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  35. Thematically organized study of (primarily) European visions of forests, waters, and mountains in many different regional and chronological contexts, quite a few of which relate to the Renaissance and Reformation.
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  37. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.
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  39. Important work which argues that attitudes toward the natural world, which Thomas portrays as (in 1500 in England) being predominantly centered on human domination over nature, gradually shifted over the next several centuries to reveal a greater interest in and understanding of the natural world in its own right. Later republished in the United States with the subtitle “A History of the Modern Sensibility.”
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  41. Whyte, Ian. “Early Modern Landscapes.” In Landscape and History since 1500. By Ian Whyte, 27–69. London: Reaktion, 2002.
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  43. Presents a short and easily accessible overview of European landscapes in 1500; the ways in which they were affected by agricultural, technological, and other developments over the next several centuries; and changing views about them.
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  45. Collections of Papers
  46.  
  47. Edited collections of scholarly articles have provided an important forum for the publication of new research on ideas about and realities of early modern environments. Several early collections such as Bilsky 1980 and Brimblecombe and Pfister 1990 reflect the emergence of environmental history as a field during the 1970s, primarily in the United States, and subsequent attempts to broaden its focus to include other geographical contexts, including Europe. Cosgrove and Daniels 1988 gathers essays with a focus on cultural geography, while the papers in Teich, et al. 1997 fall more into the category of cultural history. Interdisciplinary collections mixing the arts, humanities, social sciences, and other sciences include Laszlovszky and Szabó 2003; Hornborg, et al. 2007; Hanawalt and Kiser 2008; and Bruce 2010.
  48.  
  49. Bilsky, Lester J., ed. Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1980.
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  51. A pioneering collection containing oft-cited essays on ancient and medieval periods.
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  53. Brimblecombe, Peter, and Christian Pfister, eds. The Silent Countdown: Essays in European Environmental History. Berlin: Springer, 1990.
  54. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-75159-2Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55. This volume, the earliest on European environmental history per se, contains contributors from all over Europe, including historians, geographers, and scientists, writing on a range of different topics and time periods, some early modern.
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  57. Bruce, Scott G., ed. Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Studies in Environmental History for Richard C. Hoffmann. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010.
  58. DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004180079.i-227Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  59. Includes papers on the Great Famine of the 14th century, medieval and early modern ideas about improving soil fertility, and early modern Dutch environmental history, as well as numerous essays on the role of fish and fishing in premodern Europe.
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  61. Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels, eds. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  63. Contains several relevant essays on such topics as the symbolism of trees, Renaissance mapmaking, and ideas of geometry and landscape in Renaissance Venice.
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  65. Hanawalt, Barbara A., and Lisa J. Kiser, eds. Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
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  67. This collection of papers (four medieval, followed by three early modern) combines perspectives from ecology, literature, and art.
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  69. Hornborg, Alf, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds. Rethinking Environmental History: World-Systems Theory and Global Environmental Change. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007.
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  71. Draws together work by economic, agricultural, and environmental historians, as well as geographers and anthropologists; about a third of the essays focus on the early modern period.
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  73. Laszlovszky, József, and Péter Szabó, eds. People and Nature in Historical Perspective. Budapest: Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2003.
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  75. A collection of articles with perspectives ranging from archeological to geographical, climatological, and art historical; half of these articles concern methodological issues related to studying premodern natural environments, while the other half present medieval and/or early modern case studies. Many of the latter are from Hungary or other parts of central Europe.
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  77. Teich, Mikuláš, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson, eds. Nature and Society in Historical Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  79. The first third of this cultural-history-informed collection contains articles on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance/early modern topics.
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  81. Encyclopedias
  82.  
  83. Several encyclopedias contain relevant articles, whether from the perspective of early modern European history (Dewald 2004) or environmental history (Krech, et al. 2004).
  84.  
  85. Dewald, Jonathan, ed. Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 2004.
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  87. Contains numerous relevant articles, such as those on “Nature,” “Environment,” “Forests and Woodlands,” “Agriculture,” “Enclosure,” “Natural History,” and “Weather and Climate.” Articles are several pages each in length and contain references for further research at the end.
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  89. Krech, Shepard, III, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, eds. Encyclopedia of World Environmental History. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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  91. Has many useful articles on regions, countries (including many but not all European ones), and themes related to the natural world. Articles are typically four or five pages long, with around six to ten references, though some are much longer or shorter. Not all articles discuss and include citations for the Renaissance and Reformation period, but many do.
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  93. Dictionary
  94.  
  95. Though other specialized dictionaries may also perhaps be of help when encountering unfamiliar terms, Whyte 2013 presents a very useful single-volume aid to reading in this interdisciplinary topic.
  96.  
  97. Whyte, Ian. A Dictionary of Environmental History. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.
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  99. Entries are a page or two in length and clearly explain terms from environmental history, historical geography, historical ecology, historical archaeology, landscape history, and other disciplines with specialized vocabularies whose terms one may occasionally encounter when reading about the human relationship with the natural environment.
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  101. Primary Source Collections
  102.  
  103. Almost any anthology of primary sources focused on an area’s or period’s history or literature will, of course, turn up interesting materials related to the environment and the natural world, due to their omnipresence in human history and culture. The following anthologies, however, do have a specific focus on nature and/or the environment, and are thus especially handy. The excerpts in Antoine, et al. 1991, Bayerl and Troitzsch 1998, Mabey 1995, and Wall 1994 are fairly brief but still valuable; Torrance 1999 provides lengthier selections, although these tend to come from more literary kinds of primary sources. Hoffmann 1997 offers translations as well as interpretations of entire early modern treatises with a more specialized focus on fishing. For primary sources from the medieval period, see Jones 2013 (cited under Medieval Backgrounds).
  104.  
  105. Antoine, Serge, Jean-Baptiste de Vilmorin, and André Yana, eds. Ecrits francophones et environnement: 1548–1900. Paris: Entente, 1991.
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  107. This anthology of French-language texts dealing with nature and the natural world contains around a dozen from such 16th- and 17th-century French authors as Rabelais, Palissy, Ronsard, and Montaigne. Selections mix the literary and philosophical with excerpts from writings on the management of nature, whether relating to forestry, agriculture, or gardening.
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  109. Bayerl, Günter, and Ulrich Troitzsch, eds. Quellentexte zur Geschichte der Umwelt von der Antike bis heute. Göttingen, Germany: Muster-Schmidt, 1998.
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  111. Extensive collection of excerpts from original documents concerning both ideas of nature and environmental change, with around a dozen each for the ancient period, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. Note that these primary sources are provided in German, and that the majority of medieval and early modern excerpts are from the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this geographical limitation, exceptionally useful.
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  113. Hoffmann, Richard C., ed. Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art: Tracts on Fishing from the End of the Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
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  115. This volume contains translations of three treatises on fishing dated 1493, 1500, and 1537, together with versions in the original German (for the first two) and Spanish (for the third) on facing pages. In addition, Hoffmann provides an introduction to the book, a full chapter analyzing each primary source, and a conclusion to the book, as well as various helpful ancillary materials.
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  117. Mabey, Richard, ed. Oxford Book of Nature Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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  119. Though mainly focused on the modern period, does contain some useful ancient, medieval, and early modern primary sources, albeit in a section unfortunately titled “Out of the Dark Ages” (pp. 1–24).
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  121. Torrance, Robert M. Encompassing Nature: Nature and Culture from Ancient Times to the Modern World: A Sourcebook. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999.
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  123. An enormous anthology of sources with a literary bent; covers the period from antiquity through the end of the 18th century. Though theoretically global, includes lengthy sections on European culture, including “Renaissance Prose” (pp. 706–798) and “Renaissance Poetry” (pp. 778–850).
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  125. Wall, Derek. Green History: A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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  127. Although the majority of excerpts here are from more modern periods, there are occasional thought-provoking excerpts from ancient and Renaissance sources.
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  129. Bibliographical Databases
  130.  
  131. Though articles and books on topics relating to human interactions with nature can be found in a wide range of bibliographical databases owing to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, several are nonetheless especially useful. The Environmental History Bibliography maintained by the Forest History Society, for example, is currently very broadly conceived and includes numerous references relating to the Renaissance and Reformation period, as do the Historical Abstracts and History of Science, Technology, and Medicine databases. On the other hand, Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance has a narrower chronological focus that can be helpful in weeding out materials more relevant to the modern period.
  132.  
  133. Environmental History Bibliography.
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  135. Online database maintained by the Forest History Society, based in Durham, North Carolina. Though this database originated in a relatively narrow print bibliography of North American forest and conservation history, it has since been expanded to include citations to books, articles, and other materials (both secondary and primary) from around the globe, including numerous entries relating to the Renaissance and Reformation periods. The fact that each citation is not only presented fully but also briefly annotated with a sentence describing its topic makes the database doubly useful.
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  137. Historical Abstracts.
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  139. Online database. Although not dedicated to articles on the topic of the history of the environment per se, contains many relevant articles. Available through subscribing libraries.
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  141. History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (HSTM).
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  143. Online database. Many articles related to the environment and the natural world during the early modern period are included. Available through subscribing libraries or, as an automatic benefit of membership, to individual members of the History of Science Society.
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  145. Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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  147. Online database. Again, although not dedicated specifically to articles related to nature or the environment, contains many relevant articles. Available through subscribing libraries or, as an automatic benefit of membership, to individual members of the Renaissance Society of America.
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  149. Sample Syllabi
  150.  
  151. H-Environment’s Course Syllabus Library may be useful for those interested in teaching courses on the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
  152.  
  153. Course Syllabus Library.
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  155. Contains syllabi from courses on a wide range of geographical regions (including Europe) and themes (e.g., “Nature and Culture”); most syllabi are undergraduate, but there are some graduate-level syllabi available as well in a subsection on “Graduate Seminars.”
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  157. Society and Association Resources
  158.  
  159. Many scholarly societies and associations focusing on environmental history have sprung up over the last several decades, and have put considerable effort into providing resources of various sorts to both members and nonmembers. An overview of such organizations and their resources is provided by International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) and H-Environment Discussion Network. No such organization currently exists with a focus on the Renaissance and Reformation period specifically, but Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (ENFORMA) inevitably contains some overlaps with the Renaissance and Reformation, as well as more generally useful resources. Europeanists of any period, meanwhile, may benefit from the materials available through the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). More specialized resources are available through Climate History Network (CHN) and the Forest History Society (FHS).
  160.  
  161. Climate History Network (CHN).
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  163. Resources include a climate history bibliography, information on databases and projects, funding and employment resources, member blogs, a member list, a list of related networks, sample syllabi, and other links.
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  165. Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (ENFORMA).
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  167. Resources include a general bibliography of medieval environmental history, a list of members’ publications, descriptions of members’ current research projects, information on awards, teaching resources, and news of conferences and other events/opportunities related to medieval environmental history.
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  169. European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).
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  171. Resources include information about biennial conferences, summer schools, and other events; awards; the Society’s newsletter, current and back issues of which are available online; and other links.
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  173. Forest History Society (FHS).
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  175. Resources include a link to their Research Portal, which contains a free environmental history database (see “Bibliographical Databases”); and information about their library in Durham, NC; about their publications; about fellowships and awards; and about events and projects.
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  177. H-Environment Discussion Network.
  178. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. Resources include information about subscribing to their listserv; regular book reviews and roundtable reviews; links to organizations, networks, and research initiatives; assorted other links; and archives of past discussions.
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  181. International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO).
  182. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  183. Resources include links to the websites of all the thirty organizations that are currently members, from around the globe, including not only societies and networks but also university-based institutes and centers. In addition, information can be found on the World Congress of Environmental History, a conference held every five years (the first one was in 2009).
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  185. Journals
  186.  
  187. The journals listed below often contain relevant articles. In particular, Environmental History, Environment and History and RCC Perspectives focus on publishing articles with themes related to environmental history, while Renaissance Quarterly publishes articles on all aspects of the Renaissance period, including but far from limited to environmental history.
  188.  
  189. Environmental History. 1996–.
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  191. Journal of the American Society for Environmental History. (Preceded by Environmental History Review [1990–1995], which was preceded by Environmental Review [1976–1989].) Publishes articles on the historical dimensions of the human relationship with nature and the natural environment in all places and periods, though tends to publish more articles on North American and/or modern topics.
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  193. Environment and History. 1995–.
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  195. Journal of the European Society for Environmental History. Publishes articles on the historical dimensions of the human relationship with nature and the natural environment in all places and periods, though tends to publish more articles on European, African, Asian, Pacific, and South American topics.
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  197. RCC Perspectives. 2010–.
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  199. Online publication. Devoted to special theme issues, the number of which varies per year; many issues, though, are related to environmental history. Available on the website of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany online.
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  201. Renaissance Quarterly. 1967–.
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  203. Journal of the Renaissance Society of America. Publishes articles on all early modern topics, occasionally including ones having to do with the environment and natural world.
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  205. Medieval Backgrounds
  206.  
  207. The Renaissance and Reformation periods showed many important continuities with the medieval period that preceded them, whether in visions of nature or environmental conditions. Fortunately, medievalists have been extremely active in studying issues related to nature and the environment. Early key articles in the field include White 1968. Medieval ideas and attitudes toward nature have been explored in Roberts 1982 and Fumagalli 1994, while TeBrake 1985 (cited under Low Countries) discusses an important case study of landscape transformation in medieval Europe. Recent overviews of the field, together with its historiography and methodology, include Aberth 2012, Arnold 2008, Hoffmann 2008, and Jones 2013. See also the volumes in the Collections of Papers section, almost all of which contain essays on medieval topics, and, for the latest news in the field, the website of the Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (cited under Society and Association Resources).
  208.  
  209. Aberth, John. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature. London: Routledge, 2012.
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  211. Though the introduction tackles broader issues in the historiography of the medieval environment as a whole, the bulk of the book tends more toward an exploration of three specific (but important) aspects of medieval European attitudes toward nature, namely ideas about contagion and climate, the forest (and forest clearance), and animals.
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  213. Arnold, Ellen F. “An Introduction to Medieval Environmental History.” History Compass 6.3 (2008): 898–916.
  214. DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00534.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  215. A lucid overview of the historiography with an up-to-date bibliography.
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  217. Fumagalli, Vito. Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages. Translated by Shayne Mitchell. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1994.
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  219. Based primarily on Italian evidence, argues that the countryside, and especially the forest, were viewed with fear and fatalism during the Middle Ages, and that the city was seen as the preserve of civilization. Intended as a popular work, the book is unfootnoted, but a “Note on Further Reading and Sources” at the end (pp. 202–213) provides bibliographical citations.
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  221. Hoffmann, Richard C. “Homo et Natura, Homo in Natura: Ecological Perspectives on the European Middle Ages.” In Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser, 11–38. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
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  223. By one of the medievalists most identified with the study of environmental history; argues that medievalists need to engage more fully with questions of the relation between humans and nature, discussing in depth the examples of the medieval climate and of the changing medieval diet.
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  225. Howe, John, and Michael Wolfe, eds. Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
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  227. Many of the essays in this volume survey the landscapes of entire medieval regions, such as England and Spain; others treat of such issues as hunting in medieval France, the shifting terrain of the rabbit in medieval northern Europe, landscape perceptions in medieval France, and gender in pre-Conquest Ireland.
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  229. Jones, Richard. The Medieval Natural World. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2013.
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  231. This text, part of Pearson’s “Seminar Studies” series, provides an accessible introduction to such topics as medieval models of the universe and understandings of weather, places, animals, plants, and minerals. It is accompanied by thirty-five brief primary source documents on these themes. Good for teaching.
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  233. Roberts, Lawrence D., ed. Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982.
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  235. A collection of papers and comments, originally presented at a conference, on such topics as nature in Beowulf and Roland, nature’s femininity in medieval poetry, ideas of the Creation in the Middle Ages, the symbolism of the fleur-de-lis, and natural philosophy.
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  237. Salisbury, Joyce E. The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland, 1993.
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  239. Contains papers on topics such as medieval depictions of animals, falconry, the protohistory of pike, martyrs, monks, insects, the goddess Natura, land ownership, cultured nature, nature mysticism, and Dante’s utopian landscapes.
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  241. White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis.” In Machina ex deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture. By Lynn White Jr., 75–94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
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  243. This article by a respected medievalist, which set off numerous debates and has had a long-lasting influence, argued that the roots of environmental degradation can be traced deep in history, back to the emergence of Christianity and in particular its manifestations in the Middle Ages. The article’s final section, though, suggests that St. Francis of Assisi represented a more positive medieval Christian stance toward nature. Originally published in Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207.
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  245. Columbian Exchanges
  246.  
  247. One of the events most commonly seen as separating the medieval from the early modern world is, of course, Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492 to what he called the “Indies” but which represented what came to be called the New World. Columbus’s voyage set off a chain of events that would lead to the movements of countless species from their homes in the so-called Old World to the New World and vice versa, with momentous consequences for people and landscapes around the globe. Crosby 1972 and Crosby 1986 are the works most generally acknowledged as bringing this set of issues to the attention of environmental historians. Melville 1994 was written specifically to test his hypotheses about the effects of European livestock’s introduction to Central America, while Richards 2003 was written as part of a more general overview but nonetheless comes to similar conclusions. The quincentennial of Columbus’s travels in 1992 provided the occasion for much additional scholarly work on species transfers between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as seen most directly in Viola and Margolis 1991. Schlesinger 2007, on the other hand, is most interested in the direct impact of species exchanges on Europe itself. See also the sections Plant Commodities and Beyond Europe, both of which contain references to multiple works which discuss species exchanges.
  248.  
  249. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
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  251. Extremely influential book focused on the century after Columbus, arguing that European conquests in the Americas were strongly reinforced by the tendency of Europeans traveling to the Americas to bring with them, whether intentionally or not, Old World species of animals, plants, and microbes. These, Crosby shows, colonized the Americas in their own right, destroying native flora and fauna or killing indigenous peoples through disease. Subsequently reprinted (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) with a new preface by the author assessing earlier ideas, along with new bibliography.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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  255. This book, also extremely influential, expanded the ideas set forth in Crosby 1972, arguing that biological exchanges have been important throughout history, and further that they have unilaterally tended to favor European efforts at colonization of new lands, from the mid-Atlantic “Fortunate Isles” to entire continents like North America, South Africa, and Australia, which, Crosby argues, became “neo-Europes.”
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Melville, Elinor G. K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  258. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511571091Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. Focusing on one particular case study of grazing animals, in the Valle del Mezquital in Mexico from 1530 to 1600, this books draws on extensive archival research to show how the introduction of sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, and goats from Europe resulted in a dramatic surge in these animals’ populations, followed by a spectacular “crash” and decline in population, greatly affecting Spanish attempts to settle the region.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Richards, John F. “The Americas.” In The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. By John F. Richards, 309–460. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  263. In the four chapters that make up this section of the book, Richards explores early modern environmental changes in the West Indies, Mexico, and Brazil, coming to a similar conclusion as Crosby—that transfers of animals, plants, and diseases represented by far the most important environmental impacts on the Americas—but adding additional insight and more recent bibliographical references.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Schlesinger, Roger. “European Daily Life and America.” In In the Wake of Columbus: The Impact of the New World on Europe, 1492–1650. 2d ed. By Roger Schlesinger, 92–121. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007.
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  267. This chapter discusses how American plants like maize, “green beans,” peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and vanilla made their way for the first time into European kitchens; tobacco was introduced into Europe; and syphilis appeared as a new disease, in an exchange which may have been dwarfed by that which occurred in the opposite direction but nonetheless definitely made an impact on Europe.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds. Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991.
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  271. This large-format volume, lavishly illustrated in color, contains a series of essays on the impact of the Columbian era on the crops, landscapes, and societies of both New and Old Worlds. Though essays are not footnoted, a section “Sources and Suggested Readings” at the end of the book contains numerous bibliographic entries for each essay.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. European Landscapes
  274.  
  275. The European continent contains a range of widely diverse landscapes, some of which have been written about more than others. Almost all, however, have been affected by human activity in one way or another. The subsections here address the scholarship that has coalesced around some of these kinds of landscapes.
  276.  
  277. Forests
  278.  
  279. Forest history has long been a thriving genre of scholarship in its own right, in large part due to the existence nowadays in numerous national contexts of forestry services which have generated interest in the history of forestry in specific national contexts. Bechmann 1990, Corvol 1987, Rackham 1976, and Radkau 2012 draw on extensive literatures in their national traditions. Other recent works are aimed specifically at exploring forest management as a sign of growing state power in the early modern period; these include Appuhn 2009, Warde 2006a, and Wing 2012. In Warde 2006b, the author is in part addressing issues of state power, and in part addressing a debate of much longer standing in forest history about the degree to which use of woodlands in various parts of Europe may have become ecologically unsustainable and helped to propel Europe into the Industrial Revolution. The website of the Forest History Society also contains relevant resources (cited under Society and Association Resources).
  280.  
  281. Appuhn, Karl. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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  283. Argues that the Venetian Republic, forced to rely almost entirely on its own terraferma (on the Italian mainland) to supply timber for the city’s massive shipbuilding industry, to heat its houses, and to shore up its own watery foundations, ended up developing a bureaucracy dedicated to conserving and maximizing forest resources long before most other European states.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Bechmann, Roland. Trees and Man: The Forest in the Middle Ages. Translated by Katharyn Dunham. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
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  287. Although drawing mainly on French evidence, this book provides useful background for the understanding of woodland environments in the Renaissance and Reformation periods.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Corvol, Andrée. L’homme aux bois: Histoire des relations de l’homme et de la forêt, XVIIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1987.
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  291. The classic work on French forestry. The first third of the book discusses the early modern period.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Rackham, Oliver. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape. London: J. M. Dent, 1976.
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  295. A chronologically organized introduction to the study of forests in England and Scotland, with a helpful illustrated first chapter explaining “how woods and trees work” (pp. 15–38). Two chapters discuss the medieval and early modern periods.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Radkau, Joachim. Wood: A History. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012.
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  299. By an eminent German forest and environmental historian, this book traces the multiple uses for and increasing commodification of wood (and forests) from the Middle Ages onwards. The first third of the book discusses the medieval and early modern periods.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Warde, Paul. Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006a.
  302. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497230Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. This study, which draws on archival research in southwestern Germany, explores the interactions between local and state officials, peasants, and natural resources. Using methodologies from economic history, agricultural history, forest history, and historical geography, the book shows how peasants managed resource flows and responded to crises during a period in which the state gradually began to exert increasing control over woodlands.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Warde, Paul. “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c. 1450–1850.” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006b): 28–57.
  306. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbl009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. Surveys the state of woodlands and wood production over the course of the early modern period and argues that alarms by local and national officials about “wood scarcity” and “timber famine,” which occurred repeatedly from the 15th century onwards in locations across the European continent (from Spain to Sweden), tended to reflect political concerns rather than genuine widespread shortages.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Wing, John T. “Keeping Spain Afloat: State Forestry and Imperial Defense in the Sixteenth Century.” Environmental History 17 (2012): 116–145.
  310. DOI: 10.1093/envhis/emr123Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. Argues that starting in the 16th century, the Spanish monarchy, concerned about ensuring a steady supply of the proper kinds and quantity of wood needed for shipbuilding in its new imperial context, departed from its traditional role of mediating between local interests over forest usage and began instead to intervene by claiming ownership for itself of forest lands, mapping these lands, and supervising the planting of new trees.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Fields
  314.  
  315. Agricultural landscapes are another iconic feature of the European countryside. Here too a specialist discourse in agricultural history, closely linked to economic history and to historical geography, has long been predominant in discussions of premodern farming (see critique in Warde 2009). Solbrig and Solbrig 1994 provides a clear and accessible introduction to the topic, while Overton 1996, Sereni 1997, and De Vries 1974 discuss developments in the English, Italian, and Dutch national contexts. Both Ambrosoli 1997 and McNeill and Winiwarter 2006 discuss the relationship between agricultural knowledge, as conveyed in written texts, and agricultural practice during the early modern period, which did see some significant changes in farming methods and improved yields resulting from them. As the essays in Rotherham 2013 remind us, though, agricultural “improvements” were often—especially in the British Isles—accompanied by social unrest, as enclosure (i.e., appropriation) of common lands by landowners meant that villagers who had relied on these lands ended up, in many cases, losing their own land as well.
  316.  
  317. Ambrosoli, Mauro. The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  319. Explores the origins and spread of a “new agriculture” in Europe during the late medieval and early modern period, focusing in particular on the introduction of forage crops like clover which fixed nitrogen in the soil and thereby improved soil fertility and agricultural productivity. The book maintains that much of this transformation was due to landowners’ attempts to incorporate information from classical agricultural and botanical texts.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. McNeill, J. R., and Verena Winiwarter, eds. Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History. Isle of Harris, UK: White Horse, 2006.
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  323. Contains several useful articles on the agricultural history of preindustrial Europe.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  326. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607967Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  327. A relatively recent assessment, from an economic history perspective, of changing agricultural practices in England; argues that the most important ones occurred during the 18th century.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Rotherham, Ian D., ed. Cultural Severance and the Environment: The Ending of Traditional and Customary Practice on Landscapes Managed in Common. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013.
  330. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6159-9Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. This edited collection contains articles from around the world, but especially England, discussing the fate of previously common lands that have been “enclosed” (to use the English terminology), i.e., handed over to individual large-scale landowners, or in other ways put under new management practices. Around a third of the articles discuss the English enclosure movements of the 16th through 18th centuries and their consequences.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Sereni, Emilio. History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape. Translated by R. Burr Litchfield. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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  335. Presents a detailed chronological account of agricultural history in Italy, one of the longest-cultivated areas in Europe; several chapters discuss medieval and early modern developments.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Solbrig, Otto T., and Dorothy J. Solbrig. So Shall You Reap: Farming and Crops in Human Affairs. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994.
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  339. A chronological survey of the history of agriculture, written clearly and readably; contains several chapters on the medieval and early modern period. Good for teaching.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. De Vries, Jan. The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
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  343. Describes in detail the major agricultural changes that took place in the Netherlands during the early modern period, as urban demand and a market economy stimulated sales not only of grain but also of vegetables, industrial crops, and animal products like the famed Dutch butter and cheese. Other changes described include the intensification of production, technological innovations, and methods for ensuring improved yields, many of which were to prove influential elsewhere in Europe.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Warde, Paul. “The Environmental History of Pre-industrial Agriculture in Europe.” In Nature’s End: History and the Environment. Edited by Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, 70–92. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  346. DOI: 10.1057/9780230245099Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Argues that agricultural history has only recently come to take proper account of environmental issues, due to a way of conceptualizing farming based on “modern” methods in which agriculture has been seen as a closed system. Maintains that this way of thinking about agriculture obscures many important features of early modern agriculture.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Gardens
  350.  
  351. During the Renaissance and Reformation periods, gardens represented another site for human involvement with nature. Kiser 2003 presents some of the medieval background to this, while Lazzaro 1990 and Samson 2012 discuss Renaissance gardens in Italy and elsewhere, and Cosgrove 2008 explores the symbolism of gardens. Prest 1981 delves even more deeply into symbolism in the course of exploring the origins of specifically botanical gardens in Renaissance Europe. Hyde 2005 and Mukerji 1997, meanwhile, present two different interpretations of perhaps the most famous set of gardens in all of early modern Europe, Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles.
  352.  
  353. Cosgrove, Denis. “Gardening the Renaissance World.” In Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining, and Representing the World. By Denis Cosgrove, 51–67. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
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  355. Discusses the garden as a metaphor for the Renaissance landscape more generally.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Hyde, Elizabeth. Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
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  359. Argues that a “culture of flowers” evolved in 17th-century France, upon which Louis XIV himself drew with his gardens at Versailles as well as by incorporating it into his own personal symbolism, as a way of achieving cultural distinction.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Kiser, Lisa J. “The Garden of St. Francis: Plants, Landscape, and Economy in Thirteenth-Century Italy.” Environmental History 8.2 (2003): 229–245.
  362. DOI: 10.2307/3985710Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. Insightful analysis of an early account which claimed that St. Francis had a garden, showing that the details of the account imply a challenge to the traditions of the monastic garden and a new aesthetic vision rejecting the wealth of medieval urban and monastic elites.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Lazzaro, Claudia. The Italian Renaissance Garden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
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  367. This lavishly illustrated volume devotes the majority of its pages to discussing the design and symbolic meaning of the various features of 16th-century Italian gardens; the remaining pages describe specific gardens as case studies.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Mukerji, Chandra. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  371. Argues that Louis XIV created the gardens of Versailles within the larger context of his construction of fortresses, factories, canals, roads, and port cities across France—in other words, that he used the famously regimented and rectilinear design of the Versailles gardens to demonstrate his and the state’s capacity to dominate nature.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Prest, John M. The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
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  375. Argues that botanical gardens, though theoretically created in the pursuit of medical knowledge and to benefit the universities for which they were first established, were in fact laid out in such a way as to evoke the earthly Paradise of Christian tradition, bringing together species from all four corners of the earth. Illustrated throughout in both color and black-and-white, the book discusses such famous botanical gardens as those of Padua, Leiden, Paris, and Oxford.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Samson, Alexander, ed. Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2012.
  378. DOI: 10.1002/9781118232781Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Contains articles on gardens and gardening in 16th-century Italy, Spain, and England. Originally published as a special issue of Renaissance Studies, 25, 1 (2011).
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Cities
  382.  
  383. Though cities may seem far from any connection with nature, environmental historians have recently argued that towns and cities do, in fact, deserve attention just like any other environment. After all, even supposedly “natural” environments like forests, as has been shown repeatedly, reveal numerous traces of past human presences, and by the time of the Renaissance and Reformation many of these had come to be “managed,” just like urban areas. One area that Renaissance and Reformation city officials most certainly had to manage was that of separating water supplies from waste conduits, as discussed in the case studies in Bradley 2012, Cipolla 1992, and Zupko and Laures 1996 (which discuss Italian cities), Guillerme 1998 (which focuses on northern France), and Classen 2009 (which contains case studies from several regions). A different kind of pollution from water pollution was air pollution, which, as Brimblecombe 1987 reports, had already become a scourge in London by the High Middle Ages due to the use of coal. Appuhn 2006 analyzes Renaissance urban debates in Venice over expertise in engineering matters, while Hoffmann 2007 analyzes broader modern debates over the relationship between the city and the countryside.
  384.  
  385. Appuhn, Karl. “Friend or Flood? The Dilemmas of Flood Control in Renaissance Venice.” In The Nature of Cities: New Approaches to Urban Environmental History. Edited by Andrew Isenberg, 79–102. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006.
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  387. Argues that the city of Venice developed its own distinct style of approach to issues involving confrontation with natural forces. While other cities engaged in land drainage and reclamation schemes promoted by engineers with claimed knowledge of universal natural laws, Venice’s authorities preferred to stick with traditions of local knowledge gained from practical experience in their own city.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Bradley, Mark, ed. Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  390. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139028479Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Contains four articles on debates over urban wastes in early modern Rome: one on the 15th-century city, one on the Roman Ghetto, one on the Counter-Reformation city, and one on attempts to clean up the city in response to plague outbreaks.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times. London: Methuen, 1987.
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  395. Discusses how, from the late 13th century onwards, Londoners began to complain about the ill effects of coal brought into the city as a fuel substitute for wood. As Brimblecombe recounts, 16th- and 17th-century records are especially rich in references to and complaints about coal being used first as an industrial and then as a domestic fuel, resulting in the scholar John Evelyn’s publication of his famous Fumifugium, which proposed methods (sadly, not taken up) for cleaning and sweetening the city’s air.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Cipolla, Carlo M. Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age. Translated by Elizabeth Potter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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  399. Based on archival materials about Florentine health officials’ visits to early 17th-century Tuscan towns, this book discusses the perceived “environmental” causes of illness in medieval and early modern urban areas, most specifically from the vapors believed to emanate from filth.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Classen, Albrecht, ed. Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009.
  402. DOI: 10.1515/9783110223903Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403. This edited collection contains several articles on such topics as population, water, and waste in premodern European cities.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Guillerme, André E. The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998.
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  407. Argues that during the medieval period in France, the fact that most towns and cities were surrounded by moats and/or had numerous canals helped in the building of effective sewer systems for sanitation. In the early modern period, however, new kinds of urban fortifications created a “no man’s land” around cities that led to the decay and stagnation of waters, with foul effects which then needed to be remedied.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Hoffmann, Richard C. “Footprint Metaphor and Metabolic Realities: Environmental Impacts of Medieval European Cities.” In Natures Past: The Environment and Human History. Edited by Paolo Squatriti, 288–325. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
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  411. After a thoughtful historiographical overview of the issue of environmental relations between city and country, analyzes both “inflows” into cities (for example, of food and fuel-wood from surrounding areas) and “outflows” from them (for example, wastes) in an attempt to assess cities’ environmental dependence on the countryside.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Zupko, Ronald E., and Robert A. Laures. Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law—The Case of North Italy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
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  415. Based on an analysis of statutes and law codes from twenty-one towns and cities in northern and north-central Italy, this book argues that attempts to prevent pollution are nothing new; between 1000 and 1700, northern Italian communes drew on ancient models to establish regulations ensuring road repair, sewer construction and maintenance, and flood prevention so as to prevent both water and land pollution from butcher shops, fishermen, tanners, cloth makers, and a host of other threats.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Mountains
  418.  
  419. Mountains represent another form of European landscape which saw changes over the course of the early modern period, not only in ecological terms but in terms of the meanings attached to them. On the historical differences between upland and lowland life, as well as the changing ecologies of the former, see Dodgshon 2009, McNeill 1992, and Viazza 1989. Hollsten 2012 discusses the effects of mining on mountain landscapes, while Nicolson 1959 and Wozniakowski 1987 trace the complete reversal in (educated) European attitudes toward mountains over the course of the early modern period.
  420.  
  421. Dodgshon, Robert A. “The Environmental History of Mountain Regions.” In Nature’s End: History and the Environment. Edited by Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, 141–161. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  422. DOI: 10.1057/9780230245099Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. This article analyzes the reasons why economic and social histories have, in the author’s view, tended to ignore upland communities in favor of those on the plains, and explains the various kinds of constraint and risk faced by upland dwellers that have shaped their lives.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Hollsten, Laura. “Mercurial Activity and Subterranean Landscapes: Towards an Environmental History of Mercury Mining in Early Modern Idrija.” In Special Issue: Mining in Central Europe: Perspectives from Environmental History. Edited by Frank Uekötter. RCC Perspectives 2012.10 (2012): 21–37.
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  427. Considers the effects of mercury mining on a mountain landscape in Slovenia and its inhabitants. Available on the website of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. McNeill, J. R. The Mountains of the Mediterranean World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  430. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511529023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. Although the book’s primary focus is on the depopulation that has afflicted mountain regions in the Mediterranean over the last two centuries, the author does devote an interesting and useful chapter to exploring the “deep history” of Mediterranean mountains going back to the ancient world. Here he discusses the more minor changes that did occur in mountain landscapes during the early modern period as a result of the extension of pastoralism and the arrival of new food crops from the Americas.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959.
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  435. Argues, based primarily on English literary sources and travel diaries, that for much of the early modern period, Europeans saw mountains as ugly and dangerous places, which travelers from Northern Europe to Italy had to endure but took no pleasure in; only in the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the advent of ideas of the sublime, did mountains come to be seen as places of exaltation whose wildness could be enjoyed.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Viazza, Pier Paolo. Upland Communities: Environment, Population, and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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  439. Based in part on ethnographic fieldwork, but also drawing on demographic and other information going back to the 16th century, this book explores the insights and problems raised by conceiving of Alpine villages as ecosystems.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Wozniakowski, Jacek. Die Wildnis: Zur Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europäischen Neuzeit. Translated by Theo Mechtenburg. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987.
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  443. Discusses the changing portrayal of mountains in European literature and art; despite the subtitle’s mention of modernity, the book provides a thorough discussion of ancient, medieval, and early modern attitudes toward mountain landscapes.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Waters
  446.  
  447. Water history has become an extremely popular subfield within environmental history; for that reason, only a small selection of what has been written on the topic in a Renaissance and Reformation context can be listed here. Water could be a source of danger during times of flood, or for cities surrounded by it, as discussed in Soens 2011, Reynard 2013, and Crouzet-Pavan 2000. Water could, perhaps, be just a nuisance inhibiting the agricultural fertility of land, to be drained using engineering techniques, as in Ash 2007 and Ciriacono 2006. Then again, water could bring benefits, such as power and sanitation (Squatriti 2000), fish (Hoffmann 1996), or transportation networks and prestige (Mukerji 2009). For additional articles on these topics, see the sections on Cities and Low Countries.
  448.  
  449. Ash, Eric. “Amending Nature: Draining the English Fens.” In The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization. Edited by Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer, 116–143. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007.
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  451. This essay examines 17th-century English debates over whether the Great Level, one of the largest English wetlands, ought to be dammed, and if so, how to do it. Showing how ideas of nature were invoked in different ways on all sides of this conflict, the essay argues that different conceptions of the natural environment were fundamentally at stake.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Ciriacono, Salvatore. Building on Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times. Translated by Jeremy Scott. New York: Berghahn, 2006.
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  455. Written from an agricultural-history perspective, this book explores the varying attitudes of the Venetian and Dutch Republics to land drainage, arguing that both can be seen as “amphibious states,” but with crucial differences in their views on the management of nature. The book’s final chapter explores the travels of Dutch land reclamation engineers as they dispersed over Europe to offer their valuable expertise to other areas with wetlands.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Crouzet-Pavan, Élisabeth. “Toward an Ecological Understanding of the Myth of Venice.” In Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State. Edited by Dennis Romano and John Martin, 39–64. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  459. Delightful debunking of the myth of Venice’s lagoons as peaceful shelters which harbored the city’s first inhabitants when in the early Middle Ages they fled there for freedom; shows that instead the construction of the city was lengthy and arduous, and indeed, during the 15th century, Venetians began to see themselves as actively imperiled by the waters around them, a fear which they then used to justify repeated public works.
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  461. Hoffmann, Richard C. “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe.” American Historical Review 101.3 (1996): 631–669.
  462. DOI: 10.2307/2169418Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Argues that rivers and lakes were important sources of food for medieval Europeans, through the fish they harbored; as conditions deteriorated in medieval rivers and lakes, though, due to soil erosion from land-based agriculture and deforestation, as well as dams, some fish species, like salmon and sturgeon, declined, while others, like eels, thrived. Ultimately, fishponds had to be built to ensure a steady supply of fish, and inland fisheries had to be heavily regulated by local authorities.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Mukerji, Chandra. Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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  467. Discusses the construction of the Canal du Midi, linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean, in 17th-century France as a triumph of engineering which, while it faced strong local opposition, and in fact ultimately needed to draw on peasant local knowledge for its success, was used to showcase the idea of the absolutist state’s domination over nature.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Reynard, Pierre Claude. “Explaining an Unstable Landscape: Claiming the Islands of the Early Modern Rhône.” Environment and History 19.1 (2013): 39–61.
  470. DOI: 10.3197/096734013X13528328439036Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. This issue discusses the dilemmas caused in early modern southern France by the occasional flooding of the Rhône River, which sometimes caused small islands to disappear completely beneath the waters. This generated competing legal claims in a social system as ill equipped as any to deal with environmental unpredictability.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Soens, Tim. “Threatened by the Sea, Condemned by Man? Flood Risk, Environmental Justice and Environmental Inequalities along the North Sea Coast 1200–1800.” In Environment and Social Justice in the City: Historical Perspectives. Edited by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaut and Richard Rodger, 91–111. Cambridge, UK: The White Horse Press, 2011.
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  475. This essay discusses the difficulties faced by residents of coastal wetlands in three areas (Flanders, Holland, and Romney Marsh in southeastern England), as catastrophic dike breaches or sea wall failures tended to cause peasant smallholders to lose their land, while more wealthy individuals or organizations benefited by gaining ownership of the land vacated by the peasants.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Squatriti, Paolo, ed. Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000.
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  479. This edited collection contains contributions dealing with the use of water for power, drink, sanitation, and fishing in such places as medieval Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. History and Climate
  482.  
  483. Over the past several decades, an increasing amount of research, both scientific and archival, has suggested that the earth’s climate has shifted not only over the course of planetary history but even within the last millennium. Researchers have identified a Medieval Warm Period and, during the Late Middle Ages and early modern period, a Little Ice Age, followed by the Modern Warm Period in which we live today. Some historians have begun, being careful to avoid any sort of determinism, to explore whether this might have been one of multiple factors in historical changes that occurred in the medieval and early modern periods. Among the earliest attempts at this were Ladurie 1971 and Rotberg and Rabb 1981; these have been followed by works which, based on an even deeper analysis of the data, have ventured so far as to link climate change to social and cultural changes (Pfister, et al. 1999; Behringer, et al. 2005; and Behringer 2010). Fagan 2000 presents a readable survey of views on the Little Ice Age, while the most recent contributions to the topic can be found in Ladurie 2004, White 2011, and Parker 2013. Since historians are so dependent on scientific research in exploring this topic, those interested in keeping up to date on the latest findings might want to periodically consult the Climate History Network website (cited under Society and Association Resources).
  484.  
  485. Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Surveying climate change since the formation of the planet, but focusing most intently on the period of the “Little Ice Age,” this book examines the effects the end of the “Medieval Warm Period” had on the world and especially Europe, and argues that the cooler climate and its concomitant difficulties may well have contributed to a shift in mood on a societal scale, fostering such reactions as witch-hunting.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Behringer, Wolfgang, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, eds. Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” = Cultural Consequences of the “Little Ice Age.” Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. This volume contains sixteen essays, four of which are in English and twelve in German, which discuss possible effects of the Little Ice Age on weather, religion, society, politics, and the arts, mainly in the 16th century.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
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  495. A popular survey of the origins and effects of the Little Ice Age, with helpful footnotes at the end. Useful for teaching.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
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  499. A pioneering work which helped make climate a serious topic of study for historians. Discusses methodological issues as well as the Little Ice Age.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Histoire humaine et comparée du climat. Vol. 1, Canicules et glaciers, XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.
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  503. Lengthy volume (over 700 pages, though in relatively large type) which chronologically and exhaustively traces what is known about the climate and weather of each century (or, in some cases, decade or individual year) between 1300 and the late 18th century.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
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  507. A truly enormous volume (almost 900 pages) which argues that not only was there indeed a 17th-century crisis in Europe (as has long been debated) but that it was global in scope, extending as far as China, the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, and that evidence shows that the Little Ice Age played a key role in it.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Pfister, Christian, Rudolf Brázdil, and Rüdiger Glaser, eds. Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Its Social Dimension. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999.
  510. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9259-8Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511. The essays in this edited collection discuss the various kinds of evidence available on climate in the 16th century, attempts to reconstruct the climate, and its possible effects on such phenomena as glaciers, floods, price fluctuations, wine production, and witch-hunting. Originally appeared as a special issue of Climatic Change, 43, no. 1 (1999).
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Rotberg, Robert I., and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
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  515. A relatively early but important collection of articles on the interpretation of different kinds of evidence in climate history. In addition to methodological articles, also contains several articles specifically on the early modern period.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  518. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511844058Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. Argues that drought and cold weather caused by the Little Ice Age combined with resource shortages and rising population to bring about rebellion in the late-16th-century Ottoman Empire.
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  521. Knowledge of Nature
  522.  
  523. The Renaissance and Reformation saw the beginnings of a renewed interest in the close scrutiny of natural objects as well as the material world more generally, culminating in what is generally known as the Scientific Revolution. Historians of science as well as others have recently gone beyond previous focuses solely on the astronomical, physical, and mathematical aspects of this intellectual transformation to investigate how natural objects more generally came to be revalued and scrutinized during the 16th and 17th centuries. Thomas 1983 writes about this revaluation, while Findlen 1994, for example, explores new practices of collecting natural objects and showcasing them in what were at first private museums, and Smith scrutinizes how artisans came to turn natural objects into works of art. Ogilvie 2006 and Cooper 2007 examine naturalists’ creation of new techniques of description and inventory of local specimens in the European heartland; Schiebinger and Swan 2005 and Cook 2007, on the other hand, focus on the processes by which far-flung specimens from remote European colonial possessions around the globe came to be integrated into European networks of knowledge. Finally, Egerton 2012 attempts to trace the origins of specifically ecological or environmental thinking. On the medieval antecedents of early modern knowledge of nature, see Jones 2013 (cited under Medieval Backgrounds).
  524.  
  525. Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
  526. DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300117967.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Discusses the fascination with natural objects in the 17th-century Dutch Republic and its extensive trading empire, administered by the Dutch East India Company. Shows how specimens were procured from such far-flung areas as the Americas, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, and brought back to the Netherlands, severed from their places of origin, for study amid the profound changes of the Scientific Revolution.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  531. Examines the emergence in early modern Europe of “local floras,” regional mineralogies, and similar works which aimed to catalog specific towns’ and territories’ natural worlds, argued by some in a series of polemics to be more trustworthy and reliable than “exotic” forms of nature.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Egerton, Frank N. Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
  534. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520271746.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. This encyclopedic volume consists mainly of short biographical sketches of relevant individuals (mainly naturalists, though occasionally philosophers) and their works; its first half discusses the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance and Reformation periods.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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  539. Argues that in 16th-century Italy, studying nature was, for scholars, closely intertwined with the practice of collecting specimens. Explores the world of social interactions that emerged around these new “museums” that emerged out of scholars’ studies as scholars welcomed selected visitors into their houses and corresponded and exchanged images and samples with those unable to visit in person.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
  542. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226620862.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. This book traces the origins of a new kind of nature study in the Renaissance, one focused on the comparison of plants with discussions of them in ancient texts and, taking a step further, the comparison of plants north of the Alps with Mediterranean species; the book shows how new forms of description (both textual and visual) arose as naturalists attempted to differentiate between different kinds of plants.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
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  547. This edited collection of essays discusses the processes by which Europeans interacted with indigenous informants all over the globe to attempt to understand the new species they were encountering.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
  550. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226764269.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Argues, through images as well as text, that attempt to learn about the natural world during the 16th and 17th centuries were deeply shaped by the activities not only of learned scholars but of artisans like goldsmiths, silversmiths, engravers, woodcarvers, sculptors, and even painters who engaged with natural objects like nautilus shells, ostrich eggs, and other natural wonders to create new marvels of nature and art simultaneously. In the process, Smith argues, they developed an artisanal or vernacular epistemology for understanding nature.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.
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  555. This classic work surveys the attitudes toward the animal and vegetable worlds of a wide range of individuals in early modern England and argues that both natural theology and a new empiricism encouraged the closer study and greater admiration of even the tiniest of living things, in what amounted to a sea change from earlier attitudes toward the natural world focused on its domination.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Art and Landscape
  558.  
  559. The Renaissance and Reformation periods witnessed a veritable explosion of new kinds of art forms representing the natural world, from landscapes (first produced as a genre in their own right during the 16th century) to still lifes (again, a new genre during the Renaissance). Furthermore, visual methods of conceptualizing the natural and physical world found expression in an enormous outpouring of maps reflecting the new lands encountered by European explorers. All three of these genres are discussed in Alpers 1983; for more on landscapes in particular, see Andrews 1999, Clark 1949, Warnke 1994, and Wood 2013. Still lifes are discussed in both Bryson 1990 and O’Malley and Meyers 2008; see the later for a discussion of visual representations of nature in natural history books and manuscripts. On mapping, the undisputed authority is Woodward 2007. For yet another form of art involving nature, see also Smith 2004 (cited under Knowledge of Nature).
  560.  
  561. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
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  563. This influential study argues that 17th-century Dutch art had a profoundly different focus than the art of the Italian Renaissance: while the latter aimed to tell a story or “history,” Dutch art aimed primarily to describe, as seen in the prodigious 17th-century Dutch production of still lifes, landscape paintings, and maps.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Andrews, Malcolm. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  567. This richly illustrated thematic survey of landscape art covers the period from the Renaissance to the present; discussions of Renaissance images are to be found in almost every chapter.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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  571. This series of essays explores the flourishing of still life during several periods in history, from the landscapes of ancient Roman wall paintings to Cubism in the last century; still, the bulk of the material discussed is 17th-century, with both Dutch and Spanish still life paintings well represented. The final essay discusses the crucial question of gender: why so many artists of still lifes were women, and how still life was looked down upon at the time and still is today.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: John Murray, 1949.
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  575. This classic survey of landscape painting characterizes medieval landscapes as revealing “symbols”; northern Renaissance ones, “facts”; mannerist ones, “fantasy”; and 17th-century classicist ones, “the ideal landscape.” Laid the foundations for the modern study of landscape painting and drawing.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. O’Malley, Therese, and Amy R. W. Meyers, eds. The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008.
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  579. This luxuriantly illustrated collection of symposium papers does much to give a sense of the range of visual portrayals of nature during the Renaissance and Reformation, from masterpieces of botanical painting for the Medici to delicately textured (and often hand-painted) engravings in folio tomes to crude woodcuts in the cheapest herbals. Mainly, however, this volume focuses on the high end of the range, exploring the numerous sites and settings where science overlapped with art.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Warnke, Martin. Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.
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  583. Presents a set of fascinating interpretations of features often to be found in early modern landscape paintings, from roads, bridges, and trees to castles and monuments. Argues that images of nature usually reflected a moral vision. More than half of the chapters contain early modern material.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Wood, Christopher S. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
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  587. Provocative analysis of Altdorfer, often referred to as the first landscape painter in Europe (that is to say, the first who brought landscape out of the background of artworks and turned it into an independent subject in its own right, crafting paintings with no human being in sight). Argues that this privileging of nature amounted to a rejection of the subject, almost a form of iconoclasm that challenged the collective understanding of art at the time.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Woodward, David, ed. The History of Cartography. Vol. 3, pts. 1 & 2: Cartography in the European Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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  591. Enormous and lavishly illustrated volume continuing the high standard set by previous volumes in the series. Includes contributions by dozens of authors. Almost everything you might ever want to know about mapping between around 1400 and 1700 is to be found in this volume.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Humans and Animals
  594.  
  595. In recent years, a new interdisciplinary field known as “animal studies” has grown in popularity, with many obvious links to discussions of attitudes toward nature. Scholars have probed the ways in which diverse categories of animals have been treated in different ways, for example animals seen as fit for eating, as opposed to those kept as pets (a practice that began to increase during the Renaissance), as opposed to working animals, as opposed to perceived pests, and so forth. Many of these categories, and more, are discussed in the overviews Boehrer 2007, Fudge 2006, and Salisbury 2010. Manning 1993 provides considerable background on the charged activity of hunting (in England at least), while Fissell 2002 takes on the undesirable category of pests and vermin. Bedini 1997 and Norton 2012 discuss exotics in Europe, though Norton also discusses domestic (and domesticated) birds. And Raber and Tucker 2005 considers one of the most important animals in early modern Europe, the horse. It is worth noting, in this context, that volumes discussing the history of individual animal species are now widely available, due to the book series “Animals” published by Reaktion Books; dozens of animal species, many with fascinating early modern histories, now have their own volumes.
  596.  
  597. Bedini, Silvio. The Pope’s Elephant: An Elephant’s Journey from Deep in India to the Heart of Rome. New York: Penguin, 1997.
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  599. This lively narrative sheds considerable light on the practice (and difficulties) of gifting important figures with large exotic animals, a practice which may not have originated in the early modern period (as can be deduced from the white elephant sent to the emperor Charlemagne from Baghdad around seven hundred years earlier) but was important in acquainting Europeans with the diverse forms the animal kingdom took around the world, and providing a stimulus to the earliest royal zoos and menageries.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Boehrer, Bruce, ed. A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
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  603. The essays in this edited collection discuss a wide range of topics, from hunting rituals and domesticated animals to “Fowle Fowles.”
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  605. Fissell, Mary. “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England.” In The Animal-Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives. Edited by William Chester Jordan and Angela Creager, 77–114. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002.
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  607. Based on an analysis of popular print culture in 17th-century England, argues that those creatures seen as vermin were those that “poached” human food, whether obvious villains like foxes, weasels, and rats or less obvious ones like ospreys and cormorants. Vermin were seen as clever, communicating with each other in a secret language of deceit and breaking the bonds of social integrity. Originally published as “Constructing Vermin in Seventeenth-Century England” in History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 1–29.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
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  611. This work builds on the author’s previous books on the human-animal relationship in early modern England to discuss the perceived characteristics of each group and the distinctions between them.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Manning, Roger B. Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
  614. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198203247.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. Discusses the conduct and symbolic meanings of both (lawful) hunting and (unlawful) poaching in early modern England, and what these activities revealed about different social groups’ varying attitudes toward animals.
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  617. Norton, Marcy. “Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800. Edited by Paul Findlen, 53–83. New York: Routledge, 2012.
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  619. Explores the contexts in which parrots and Amerindian feathers made their way from the Americas to Europe, and the contexts in which native European birds were domesticated for hunting (in the case of falcons) and eating (in the case of chickens).
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  621. Raber, Karen, and Treva J. Tucker, eds. The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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  623. This edited collection gathers essays on one of the most important and prestigious animals in Renaissance Italy, France, Germany, Muscovy, and England, showing how central horses were to elite social and cultural identity.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Salisbury, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2010.
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  627. This classic discussion by a literary scholar examines the kinds of stories that were told about animals during the Middle Ages, often about breaking the boundaries between human and animal (for example, through monsters and some of the unusual creatures to be found in bestiaries).
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Plant Commodities
  630.  
  631. Recent scholarly attempts to trace patterns in economic, social, and cultural history by examining the trajectory of individual species have not been limited to animals; rather, plants as well have been seen as offering opportunities to learn about the history of human-nature interactions in new ways. Many of these studies of the history of plant species have taken the form of commodity histories, given the longstanding history of shipping crops from one place to another, which was enhanced in the world of global trade that followed Columbian encounters. Some of these commodities became the basis for entire social institutions or new kinds of activities that centered around them, as in Cowan 2005, Norton 2008, and Schivelbusch 1992. Others were eagerly sought after as medicinal drugs, as discussed in Foust 1992 and Nappi 2012. Still others profoundly reshaped the European diet more generally, as can be seen in Mintz 1985 and Salaman 1949. Whichever trajectory they took, during the period before they became fully domesticated in European social life, while they were still capable of being seen as exotic imports, many of them profoundly influenced the ways early modern Europeans saw the natural world.
  632.  
  633. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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  635. A fascinating study of how coffee traveled from Arabia to the Ottoman Empire and from there to England, creating an important early modern social institution in the process.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Foust, Clifford M. Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
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  639. This intriguing book discusses the early modern European quest for live specimens of this tantalizing medicinal herb, which despite its commendable therapeutic effects had only ever been spotted in the form of dried roots. The quest led first to Russia and then China, as searchers attempted to solve the mysteries of the plant.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.
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  643. In this classic commodity history, half of which is devoted to the early modern period, Mintz explores how sugar production was transformed from a small-scale endeavor on select Mediterranean and Atlantic islands to a proto-industrial enterprise in the slave colonies of the Caribbean, geared to satisfying European consumers’ seemingly insatiable appetites.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Nappi, Carla. “Surface Tension: Objectifying Ginseng in Chinese Early Modernity.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800. Edited by Paula Findlen, 31–52. New York: Routledge, 2012.
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  647. Discusses early modern attempts to figure out which of a number of similar plants was the “true” ginseng, i.e., to stabilize and standardize a single unique natural object as being the famous medicinal root, as specimens circulated throughout Asia and even, due to global trade, in places as far away as England and Canada.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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  651. Investigates how these two plants, originally used for ritual purposes in Amerindian societies, became popular commodities within early modern Europe.
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  653. Salaman, Redcliffe. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1949.
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  655. A classic study of an Andean root vegetable that, at first viewed with some suspicion in Europe, ultimately became a staple crop in certain places in Europe, like Ireland (though the potato’s reception and use in other places in Europe is discussed as well). The first half of the book focuses on the early modern period.
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  657. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Translated by David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
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  659. This lively account of the emergence, following spices, of coffee, tea, and chocolate as desirable luxuries in early modern Europe, far from their homelands, shows how they each became associated with certain social and cultural values: coffee, for example, seen as sobering and promoting hard work, caught on in Protestant England (before it was replaced by tea), as opposed to chocolate, with its connotations of sensuous decadence, in Catholic Spain.
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  661. National and Regional Contexts
  662.  
  663. Unlike some aspects of nature—for example, the laws of physics—natural environments have tended throughout history to vary greatly from place to place, even though some of their distinctiveness may currently be disappearing. So too have human attitudes toward these environments, as well as the ways in which scholars have discussed the histories of these environments. The subsections here explore how some of these dynamics have played out on the European continent.
  664.  
  665. Mediterranean and Southern Europe
  666.  
  667. As probably the longest-inhabited part of the European continent, the Mediterranean lands have a deep and rich history of human interactions with nature. Much of this has been written about by historical geographers, archeologists, ecologists, and others not formally part of the historical profession; Bess, et al. 2000 and, most eloquently, Massard-Guilbaud 2002–2003 call attention to the ways in which the term “environmental history” has remained relatively little used in the countries of “Southern Europe” (unlike their northern counterparts) and, much more problematically, discussions of environmental themes have been seen as falling outside the mainstream of historical inquiry. Surveys of the human-nature relationship in the Mediterranean have frequently been written by authors from outside the region, as in the case of Grove and Rackham 2001, Horden and Purcell 2000, and Hughes 2005. Still, the writings by the authors and editors included here, for example Beck and Delort 1993 in the French context, Bonamico 1992 in the Italian one, and Gonzáles de Molina and Mártinez-Alier 2001, as well as numerous others, points to a bright future for continued scholarly work on the relationship between humans and nature in the Mediterranean.
  668.  
  669. Beck, Corinne, and Robert Delort, eds. Pour une histoire de l’environnement. Paris: CNRS, 1993.
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  671. The majority of the articles in this anthology concern France; around half are focused on the ancient, medieval, or early modern periods.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Bess, Michael, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert. “Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe.” Environmental History 5.4 (2000): 545–556.
  674. DOI: 10.2307/3985586Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. Though limited in scope (the only countries discussed are France and Italy) and with a somewhat modern focus, presents a useful overview of the varying national historiographical traditions as well as numerous citations to the literature.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Bonamico, Sergio. Uomo ed ambiente nella storia del paesaggio italiano. Rome: Gangemi, 1992.
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  679. Large-format book with many illustrations surveying the history of the Italian countryside, with multiple chapters on the early modern period. It should be noted that there are no footnotes, and that the bibliography runs to just four pages. Still, a very useful resource.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Gonzáles de Molina, Manuel, and Joan Mártinez-Alier, eds. Naturaleza transformada: Estudios de historia ambiental en España. Barcelona: Icaria, 2001.
  682. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  683. This edited collection of essays on Spanish environmental history is mainly modern in focus, but does contain several useful essays addressing the early modern period.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Grove, A. T., and Oliver Rackham. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
  686. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  687. Well-illustrated large-format book dedicated to a series of themes (such as climate and plant life) and specific kinds of landscape (such as “Mediterranean savanna,” cultivation terraces, “Euro-deserts and karst,” and “deltas and soft coasts”). Although the authors write from a scientific and geographical perspective, their essays are quite readable. Early modern content is to be found in a chapter on the “Little Ice Age” as well as scattered throughout.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
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  691. A massive work with an equally massive bibliographical apparatus, consisting of enormous bibliographical essays for each chapter followed by a “Consolidated Bibliography” of almost a hundred pages. Focused primarily on the ancient and medieval periods, but with considerable discussion of early modernity as well. Although this is not indicated in the title, the greater part of the book does indeed focus on environmentally related themes such as “Mediterranean microecologies.”
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Hughes, J. Donald. The Mediterranean: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
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  695. An introductory-level reference work which contains chapters on the Mediterranean in the medieval and early modern periods. The bibliography at the end has been helpfully annotated.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Massard-Guilbaud, Geneviève. “De la ‘part du milieu’ à l’histoire de l’environnement.” Le Mouvement social 200 (2002–2003): 64–72.
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  699. Discusses the historiography of the environment in France, arguing that despite outsiders’ admiring praise of the Annales School’s insistence over the course of the last century on the importance of geography for historical understanding, writers in this tradition did indeed tend to see geography as more of a background for human activity than anything else. Nonetheless, the author sees signs of promise for the future in recent work she describes.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Northern Europe
  702.  
  703. Though it is somewhat unclear what Northern Europe is supposed to consist of—the surveys by Cioc, et al. 2000 and Whited, et al. 2005 cover somewhat different areas—these works to help to highlight some contrasts between the landscapes as well as historiographies of Northern and Southern Europe. For more on some of the countries discussed in these works, see also the sections on Nordic Countries, Low Countries, and British Isles.
  704.  
  705. Cioc, Mark, Björn-Ola Linnér, and Matt Osborn. “Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe.” Environmental History 5.3 (2000): 396–406.
  706. DOI: 10.2307/3985483Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  707. Discusses the historiography of nature and the environment in Germany, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom; despite a modern focus, the discussion of national traditions of writing, from historical geography to landscape history and environmental history, is helpful.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Whited, Tamara, Jens I. Engels, Richard C. Hoffmann, Hilde Ibsen, and Wybren Verstegen. Northern Europe: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
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  711. Chronologically organized introductory-level work containing chapters on both the medieval and early modern periods. Discusses the region between around 45 and 65 degrees of latitude, i.e., the British Isles and the northern half of France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia, and the German-speaking countries. Has helpful glossary and bibliographic essay at the end.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Nordic Countries
  714.  
  715. Historians in Scandinavia—or, to be more accurate, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as the term “Scandinavia” is often seen as unnecessarily limiting—have in recent years produced a sizeable body of work about interactions between people and nature in northern lands as well as further afield. Jørgensen, et al. 2013 provides an overview of the historical work on environmental topics throughout this region, while Hastrup 1990 and Oslund 2011 focus on Iceland, Kjaergaard 1994 on Denmark, Myllyntaus 2003 on Finland, Myrdal 2007 on Sweden, and Björk, et al. 2009 on the region joining Denmark and Sweden.
  716.  
  717. Björk, Fredrik, Per Eliasson, and Bo Poulsen, eds. Transcending Boundaries: Environmental Histories from the Øresund Region. Skrifter med historiska perspektiv 9. Malmö, Sweden: Malmö University, 2009.
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  719. This edited collection discusses a number of topics related to the Øresund region, centered on the straits between Denmark and Sweden (or, more accurately, between Copenhagen and Helsingør in Denmark, and Helsingborg and Malmö in Sweden). Several essays discuss fishing and forestry in this area in the early modern period.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Hastrup, Kirsten. Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400–1800: An Anthropological Analysis of History and Mentality. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
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  723. Discussing the period from the Black Death in Iceland through the Reformation and witch-hunts up to 18th-century campaigns for agricultural and technological “improvement,” explores the Icelandic “dual economy” of farming and fishing in anthropological and ecological perspective.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Jørgensen, Finn Arne, Unnur Birna Karlsdóttir, Erland Mårald, Bo Poulsen, and Tuomas Räsänen, eds. “Entangled Environments: Historians and Nature in the Nordic Countries.” Historisk Tidsskrift 92 (2013): 9–34.
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  727. A historiographical essay on recent work in environmental history, including some with early modern content, by historians in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Contains a very useful bibliography.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Kjaergaard, Thorkild. The Danish Revolution, 1500–1800: An Ecohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  730. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511665103Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  731. Argues that during the early modern period, Denmark fell increasingly into agricultural crisis due to the medieval depletion of forests, the drifting of sand dunes, population pressure, excessive consumption by the fiscal-military state, floods, soil depletion, and an overabundance of cattle; only in the 18th century was this crisis resolved through a “green revolution” which countered the growing acidification and infertility of the soil.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Myllyntaus, Timo. “Writing About the Past in Green Ink: The Emergence of Finnish Environmental History.” In Värna, vårda, värdera: Miljöhistoriska aspekter och aspekter på miljöhistoria. Edited by Erland Mårald and Christer Nordlund. Skrifter från forskningsprogrammet Landskapet som arena 10. Umeå, Sweden: Landskapet som arena, 2003.
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  735. A historiographical essay with useful bibliography.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Myrdal, Janken. “Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire.” In Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change. Edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, 79–99. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007.
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  739. Argues that the expansionism of the Swedish Empire in the 17th century must be understood at least in part as caused by environmental problems that made it difficult to grow enough food to feed the Swedish population, providing an additional incentive for the conquest of Baltic territories.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Oslund, Karen. Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.
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  743. Though the focus of this book is primarily on the modern period, contains useful information and bibliography about ideas of nature in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland in earlier periods.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Eastern Europe and Russia
  746.  
  747. The environmental history of Russia and Eastern Europe must be seen as an important counterpart to that of Western Europe, with very different landscapes involved. Unfortunately, not much about Eastern European interactions with nature in the early modern period has been published in English or Western European languages (though the same could quite possibly be said in reverse); following the fall of the Iron Curtain, considerable attention has been paid to environmental problems in Eastern European countries, but that same attention has not been extended to their pre-20th-century history. In the case of Russia, Bruno 2007 provides a historiographical overview, while Weiner 2009 discusses the role of the state in the deforestation of much of Russia. On the topic of Russian expansion, Martin 1986 and Lajus 2011 discuss ventures into the Russian north in search of furs and fish, while Richards 2003 and Sunderland 2004 report on ventures into the southern steppes. Kivelson 2006, on the other hand, draws on maps to present a more culturally oriented interpretation of Russian views of their landscape.
  748.  
  749. Bruno, Andy. “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8 (2007): 635–650.
  750. DOI: 10.1353/kri.2007.0031Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  751. Historiographical essay mainly focused on the modern period, but with some useful bibliography relevant to the early modern period.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Kivelson, Valerie. Cartographies of Tsardom: The Landscape and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
  754. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  755. Analyzes 17th-century maps in order to explore the cultural meaning to Russians of their own landscape.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Lajus, Julia. “Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier.” In Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies. Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund, 164–190. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.
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  759. The first half of this article discusses the movement of Russian-speakers northwards during the medieval and early modern periods, as settlers from Novgorod and Muscovy sought fish (especially salmon and cod), marine mammals, and furs for subsistence and trade.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Martin, Janet. Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
  762. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523199Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  763. Examines the various kinds of fur trade, in particular the squirrel and sable fur trade, carried out by Bulgar, Kievan Rus, Novgorod, Muscovy, and Kazan from the 9th through the 16th centuries and its connection to state formation under these different civilizations.
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Richards, John F. “Frontier Settlement in Russia.” In The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. By John F. Richards, 242–273. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  767. Discusses Russian expansion southwards and eastwards from the 15th and 17th centuries and its environmental consequences, as the originally forested southern steppe lost many of its woodlands, the grasslands were burned and/or plowed up, extractive activities were carried out at a new level of intensity, and native plant and animal species were driven out to be replaced by grain crops and domestic animals.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Sunderland, Willard. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
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  771. This book’s first chapter discusses Russian settlement of the southern steppe from the Middle Ages through the 18th century and its ecological and social impacts on the nomadic peoples who lived there.
  772. Find this resource:
  773. Weiner, Douglas R. “The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History.” In The Environment and World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 276–314. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
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  775. Argues that while early Slavs valued and depended on forests, ever since the 13th-century Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, and subsequently the rise of the Muscovite state, successive regimes led to the clearing of forests and the loss of considerable biological diversity in Muscovy (and eventually the broader territories of Russia). Subsequently reprinted in J. R. McNeill and Alan Roe, eds. Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 283–319.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. East Central Europe
  778.  
  779. As with Eastern Europe, language barriers have to some degree hindered knowledge among English-speaking historians about East Central European scholarship on the human relationship with the natural environment; the interdisciplinary nature of the research, with much of it being published under the aegis of geography or ecology, has also not contributed to the easy dissemination of knowledge about work being done in the countries of East Central Europe (for example, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia). Winiwarter, et al. 2004 and Petrić 2012, however, contain useful information about East Central European research projects, while Laszlovszky and Szabó 2003 provides a selection of essays from Hungary and the regions neighboring it. Among other contributions, Hoffmann 1989 discusses agriculture in one region of late medieval Poland and Kleingärtner, et al. 2013 discusses medieval landscapes across the entire northern part of East Central Europe, including the Baltic states. On mining in one region of early modern Slovenia, see Hollsten 2012 (cited under Mountains).
  780.  
  781. Hoffmann, Richard C. Land, Liberties and Lordship in the Late Medieval Countryside: Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
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  783. This volume presents a detailed analysis of changing agricultural and other landscapes in the area formerly known as Silesia in what is now Poland.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Kleingärtner, Sunhild, Timothy P. Newfield, Sébastien Rossignol, and Donat Wehner, eds. Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe: Interactions between Environmental Settings and Cultural Transformations. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2013.
  786. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787. This edited collection of primarily archeological studies analyzes landscapes in medieval Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states.
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Laszlovszky, József, and Péter Szabó, eds. People and Nature in Historical Perspective. Budapest: Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2003.
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  791. This collection of articles, the majority on medieval and early modern topics, has a Hungarian bent.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Petrić, Hrvoje. “Environmental History in Croatian Historiography.” Environment and History 18 (2012): 623–627.
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  795. This historiographical article informs the reader about recent developments not only in Croatian but also other East Central European contexts, since while much interesting work has been done recently on the early modern period, an especially interesting set of projects, involving international cooperation with a number of universities, has explored the borderlands between the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire in early modern Europe.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Winiwarter, Verena, Marco Armiero, Petra van Dam, et al. “Environmental History in Europe from 1994 to 2004: Enthusiasm and Consolidation.” Environmental History 10.4 (2004): 501–530.
  798. DOI: 10.3197/0967340042772685Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  799. Includes a discussion of the state of environmental history in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, along with other European countries.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. West Central Europe
  802.  
  803. There has been a steady increase over the last several decades in environmental histories and similar works from and about Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Indeed, a number of edited collections on the region have even appeared in English—unfortunately, however, almost all of these have confined themselves entirely to the discussion of the modern period (the article Radkau 2005 presents a rare exception). For this reason, most books on the environmental history of the region which reflect a somewhat fuller historical perspective, stretching as far back as the Renaissance and Reformation, are to be found only in German. Reith 2007 provides an excellent introduction to the scholarship, while Küster 1995 illuminates the historical ecology of Central European landscapes. Meanwhile, the edited collections Ruppel and Steinbrecher 2009, Sieferle and Breuninger 1999, and Duceppe-Lamarre and Engels 2008 are good sources for articles on the early modern period. Over the past decade, still further edited collections have emerged out of the University of Göttingen (see Herrmann 2007–2011).
  804.  
  805. Duceppe-Lamarre, François, and Jens Ivo Engels, eds. Umwelt und Herrschaft in der Geschichte = Environnement et pouvoir: Une approche historique. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008.
  806. DOI: 10.1524/9783486989274Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  807. Contains articles in both German and French (each with a brief summary in the other language), half of them on medieval and early modern topics such as the historiography of medieval environmental history, medieval hunting, and early modern hunting.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Herrmann, Bernd, ed. Beiträge zum Göttinger umwelthistorischen Kolloquium. Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2007–2011.
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  811. This series of edited collections, along with its companion Schauplätze der Umweltgeschichte (2006–2010; around four volumes appeared of each), present the work of, respectively, speakers at a colloquium series held at the University of Göttingen and PhD students in an interdisciplinary environmental history program there. Unfortunately, the funding for the program has run out, so there will be no more of these, but the volumes contain numerous articles on early modern Central European environmental history. Also available online.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Küster, Hansjörg. Geschichte der Landschaft in Mitteleuropa: Von der Eiszeit bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995.
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  815. Chronologically organized history of the Central European landscape, with several chapters on the medieval and early modern periods as well as numerous color illustrations.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Radkau, Joachim. “Germany as a Focus of European Particularities.” In Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History. Edited by Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller, 17–32. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
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  819. This essay on images of the German landscape—for example, that of the primeval Germanic forest—has much of interest to the Renaissance and Reformation scholar.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Reith, Reinhold. Umweltgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007.
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  823. Although this volume surveys all of Europe in the early modern period, it is particularly strong on topics relating to German-speaking countries. The bibliography, containing both German-language and English-language citations, is extraordinarily comprehensive and thorough.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Ruppel, Sophie, and Aline Steinbrecher, eds. “Die Natur ist überall bey uns”: Mensch und Natur in der frühen Neuzeit. Zürich: Chronos, 2009.
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  827. This edited collection contains a wide variety of articles on early modern German, Swiss, and Austrian topics, discussing, for example, the early modern Danube, domesticated nature indoors, cattle plagues, thunder, relations between religion and nature in the wake of the Reformation, and early modern natural history.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Sieferle, Rolf Peter, and Helga Breuninger, eds. Natur-Bilder. Wahrnehmungen von Natur und Umwelt in der Geschichte. Frankfurt: Campus, 1999.
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  831. This edited collection contains several essays on premodern topics, which variously discuss agricultural ideas from antiquity through Renaissance Venice, advice manuals for early modern householders, and Northern Renaissance art.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Low Countries
  834.  
  835. The province of Holland in the Netherlands has, of course, long been the subject of fascination due to the striking heroic narratives that have been produced about its inhabitants’ “battle” against the North Sea to keep the province above water. Rarely have human struggles against the forces of nature been quite so visible, even if much of the literature of environmental history, the history of agriculture, and so forth contains quite explicit descriptions of the amount of labor required to sustain human societies. Holland is not the only part of the Low Countries that historians have found of interest, however, as considerable research has been done on the remainder of the Netherlands (see the historical geography in Keuning 1977) and on the provinces of present-day Belgium (see for example Soens 2011, cited under Waters), and natural forces other than water have also been found of interest. The Dutch use of peat for fuel, for example, has attracted attention and is discussed in van Dam 2000 and Unger 1984. Poulsen 2008 analyzes one of the most important Dutch fisheries. On land drainage and the making of polders, see TeBrake 1985 as well as Ciriacono 2006, Soens 2011, and Squatriti 2000 (all cited under Waters). On Dutch agriculture more generally, see De Vries 1974 (cited under Fields).
  836.  
  837. Dam, Petra J. E. M. van. “Sinking Peat Bogs: Environmental Change in Holland, 1350–1550.” Environmental History 5.4 (2000): 32–45.
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  839. Discusses how the mining of peat for fuel in Holland destroyed the soil and created enormous lakes, while simultaneously boosting the eel fisheries.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. Keuning, H. J. Kaleidoscoop der Nederlandse Landschappen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
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  843. Chronologically organized historical geography of the Netherlands, providing “snapshots” of its landscape around the years 1300, 1500, and 1700, among others.
  844. Find this resource:
  845. Poulsen, Bo. Dutch Herring: An Environmental History, c. 1600–1860. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008.
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847. Written using approaches from economic history, historical geography, and marine environmental history, this book surveys the increasing catch by Dutch fishermen.
  848. Find this resource:
  849. TeBrake, William H. Medieval Frontier: Culture and Ecology in Rijnland. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985.
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  851. Examines how, between the late 10th and early 14th centuries, land reclamation and colonization removed the last vestiges of wilderness in the western Netherlands (in particular, the areas that are now Holland and Zeeland), as peat bogs were drained and settled and a new social order emerged based on hydraulic control.
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Unger, Richard W. “Energy Sources for the Dutch Golden Age: Peat, Wind, and Coal.” Research in Economic History 9 (1984): 221–253.
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  855. Discusses how rather than relying almost entirely on wood as a source for fuel to heat homes and run furnaces, as most other European countries did (except for England with its plentiful coal supply), the Netherlands in the 17th century made use of peat cut from bogs, windmills, and coal imports from England to fuel its Golden Age.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. British Isles
  858.  
  859. A sizeable amount has been written about interactions between people and nature in the United Kingdom and Ireland. On England, Hoskins 1955, Osborn 2001 (Sowing the Field of British Environmental History), and Simmons 2003 form useful general starting points. Scotland is well served in Smout 2000 (though Simmons 2003 also contains relevant material). Foster 1998 and Mitchell and Ryan 1997 discuss Ireland. Walsham 2011 discusses all of these areas in the course of describing the Reformation’s impact on the sacred geography of the British Isles.
  860.  
  861. Foster, John Wilson, ed. Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.
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  863. This edited collection on such topics as Irish plants, animals, rocks, woodlands, boglands, and debates over nature contains extensive early modern material scattered throughout the volume.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Hoskins, W. G. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Penguin, 1955.
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  867. A classic survey, chronologically organized and with several chapters on the medieval and early modern periods.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Mitchell, Frank, and Michael Ryan. Reading the Irish Landscape. Rev. ed. Dublin: Town House, 1997.
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  871. Focused primarily on the prehistoric development of the Irish landscape, but does contain some useful discussion of medieval and early modern matters. Well illustrated.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Osborn, Matt. “Sowing the Field of British Environmental History.” 2001.
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  875. Very useful historiographical article that sorts out different strains of scholarship and contains numerous discussions of early modern developments. Note that the endnotes do not contain citations for all the books mentioned in the body of the article, though; the article discusses far more books than a glance at the endnotes would suggest.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Simmons, I. G. An Environmental History of Great Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
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  879. A mammoth survey with only one chapter covering both the medieval and early modern period, but the chapter is a lengthy one. Has some useful black-and-white illustrations as well as an extensive bibliography.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. Smout, T. C. Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
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  883. This thematically organized history contains much of value for the early modern historian, particularly in its first three chapters, which focus on ideas of nature, woodlands, and fields.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  886. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243556.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  887. Discussed how the “sacred geography” of the British Isles, marked during the Middle Ages by a host of shrines, sanctuaries, monasteries, and pilgrimage sites, was reshaped during the Reformation period as Protestants and Catholics debated specific sites and adapted to the new situation, for example by turning holy wells into therapeutic spas.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Beyond Europe
  890.  
  891. Over the past several decades, an increasing number of works have begun to appear on the topic of early modern environmental history in locales across the globe. Some of these, of course, were places strongly affected by European imperialism; on issues of colonialism and imperialism, see Arnold 1996, Beinart and Hughes 2007, and Grove 1995, as well as the sections Columbian Exchanges and Plant Commodities. Other works, however, discuss areas where state formation, population pressures, and other similar factors seem to have caused developments remarkably similar to those in Europe, without the pressure of European colonialism, as in many of the case studies in Richards 2003. Marks 1997 and Perdue 1987, discussing specific Chinese provinces, seem to fall into this camp, along with Totman 1989. Webb 1995, meanwhile, shows the impact that climate change can have on history.
  892.  
  893. Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
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  895. Synthetic and readable historiographical account tracing the many ways in which historians have approached questions of nature, colonialism, and empire, whether through discussions of unintentional ecological exchange or of the conscious imposition of environmental change on conquered territories. Contains extensive bibliography.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Beinart, William, and Lotte Hughes. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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  899. This cowritten volume is one of a number of “Companions” to the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. Though obviously limited to British imperial evidence, the volume explores a set of topics from across the former Empire, with chapters on Caribbean plantations and on the fur trade in Canada probably the most rewarding for early modernists.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origin of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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  903. Argues that conservation efforts began much earlier than previously thought, as British and French officials stationed in a range of colonies (especially small island ones, quick to show the effects of deforestation and similar problems) drew on indigenous knowledge as well as European ideas of the time about climate to attempt to conserve the environments and natural resources of these colonies. The first several chapters will be of the greatest relevance for those interested in the early modern period.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Marks, Robert. Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  907. Focusing on the Lingnan area between 1400 and 1850, this book explores how climatic change, population dynamics, commercialization, and state activity interacted to cause land degradation and loss of biodiversity by the middle of the 17th century.
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  909. Perdue, Peter C. Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850. Harvard East Asian Monographs 130. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1987.
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  911. Discusses efforts by the Chinese state, following a major rebellion in this frontier province, to resettle uprooted people, reopen abandoned land, and increase agricultural productivity, efforts which succeeded but depleted the soils.
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  913. Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  915. Includes case studies from Taiwan, China, Japan, South Africa, the West Indies, Mexico, Brazil, eastern North America, Siberia, and the northern oceans as well as the British Isles. A pathbreaking work.
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  917. Totman, Conrad D. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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  919. Argues that Japanese forests, logged increasingly intensively during a period of centralized government from 1570 to 1670, subsequently recovered as a result of the “regenerative” forestry practiced by government forest officials and agronomists of the Edo period.
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  921. Webb, James L. A., Jr. Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
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  923. Discusses how, from around 1600 on, the transitional zone of the Western Sahel (between the Sahara Desert and the West African savanna) rapidly became more arid, causing the desert to move south and dramatically disrupting the lives of both pastoral and agricultural peoples. As the author shows, this caused a cavalry revolution which helped bring down empires and reshaped commerce between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.
  924. Find this resource:
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