From Charters and Accounts to Weather Records and Chronicles. Perceptions of Environment and their Diversity in 14th-Century England

About the event

The history of Fourteenth-century England has long been written as a history of kings and their wars or as a history of the emerging legal system and parliamentarism. The environmental challenges of the time have only recently gained prominence in historical research. The environmental history of late medieval England is first of all a history of perceptions. References to weather and other environmental phenomena in contemporary sources must be critically examined to assess their specific value and significance. Against this background, I will present and discuss evidence from manorial accounts, royal charters, the learned astro-meteorological discourse as well as contemporary historiography. Thus, the variety of perceiving and speaking about the environment in Fourteenth-century England will come to light and enable us to compare these findings with research on other periods.

Presenter

Maximilian Schuh is a lecturer in Medieval History at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the history of universities in the Holy Roman Empire in the later Middle Ages and on the perceptions of environment in Fourteenth century England. Furthermore, he is interested in the collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences. Among his publications are his dissertation "Aneignungen des Humanismus" (2013), a handbook on sources for medieval and early modern university history (2018) as well as several articles and book chapters on the environmental history of the Middle Ages.

Reading

Buchanan Sharp, “Royal Paternalism and the Moral Economy in the Reign of Edward II: The Response to the Great Famine.” The Economic History Review 66, no. 2 (2013): 628–47.

Organizer

KLIMER

NB: External guests should register with Ada Arendt.