An Abundance of Fishes
An Abundance of Fishes

An Abundance of Fishes

“Spring Break” doesn’t mean the same thing for graduate students as it does for undergrads—my students are off enjoying the sun in parts south, while I’m shivering through an Iowan March as I face down a pile of grading and what feels like an equally large “to do” pile. Part of that is catching up on writing about events that happened, oh, say a fortnight ago?

6a013486c64e2e970c017c3803de0b970bThe Graduate History Society’s Guest Speaker this year was Richard C. Hoffmann (Emeritus, York University). Professor Hoffmann’s work is of course known to anyone with an interest in medieval environmental or ecological history—he’s one of the founding figures in the field.

Hoffmann gave GHS’s keynote speech on March 7th, on “Higher Authority: the State, Private Rights, and the ‘Common Good’ in Late Medieval Resource Management.” It was a really interesting analysis of how medieval theories of government and property rights intersected with attempts to promote sustainable economic practices. There is perhaps a tendency nowadays to think of an awareness of environmental sustainability being a peculiarly modern phenomenon, but of course this is not the case. Medieval people certainly had very different motivations, and a very different understanding of how the world worked, but they were still aware that economic resources had to be appropriately managed if they were to be conserved over time.

Professor Hoffmann demonstrated this by looking at shared patterns of rhetoric about public resources, and their protection and management, which spread across polities in western Europe between roughly 1300 and 1600. He focused first on woodlands in France, Venice and Upper Germany (around Salzburg and Württemberg), where perceived timber shortages, and perceived or actual misuse of woodlands by private individuals, led to state appropriation of these woods. This led to the creation of an administrative apparatus to manage these newly royal or civic woodlands (as was the case with, for example, the establishment of the post of maître des eaux et forêts in fourteenth-century France), and also to a decrease in biodiversity.

The second area of focus was rivers, such as the ultimately fruitless attempts at flood management in fourteenth-century Rouissillon, or to stave off disordine idrico (hydrological disorders) in Lombardy and Tuscany. Here Hoffmann noted signs of proto-ecological awareness in the contemporary knowledge that these floods were caused by, and exacerbating, devastating erosion. Again, just as with woodland management, the use of the idea of the “common good” as a means of harnessing support for governmental conservation efforts was prevalent, while biodiversity was reduced in riverine environments just as in woodland areas.

Lastly, Hoffmann looked at Italian, Scottish and Austrian attempts to manage their “abundance of fishes”. He looked in most details at Perugian management of Lago Trasimeno from 1260 to 1368, using restrictions on net size and catching season. However, the biggest laugh of the lecture came from discussing how a twelfth-century Scottish law mandated that in order to accommodate salmon, all weirs must have a permanent midstream opening large enough to allow a three-year-old pig to turn around in it without his snout touching his tail.

Now that is a bewilderingly precise law.

Overall, Professor Hoffmann’s lecture presented an image of a largely consistent framework for state intervention in later medieval Europe, where perceived resource shortages and environmental hazards created an ideology of “higher purpose”, more administrative standardisation and a loss of natural diversity.

These ideas were picked up the following day in a roundtable discussion officially entitled “Sources for Environmental History” but which became much more broadranging than that, touching on the political implications of environmental history and how the field skirts with (and can and should avoid) environmental determinism. Professor Hoffmann was joined by Jim Giblin and Tyler Priest, both from the Department of History, which gave us an interesting mix of areas of expertise: medieval Europe, nineteenth and twentieth century Tanzania and late twentieth/early twenty-first century America. As a medievalist, it always makes me boggle a little to hear other historians talk about the difficulties of sifting through an abundance of materials (a problem I wish we had!), but I think that’s one of the plus points of conversations across fields like this—it reminds me that history is not, and cannot be, practiced in a uniform way.

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