Art historians have long associated medieval Europe’s twelfth-century “discovery of nature”—and its supposedly revitalized attention to the physical world—with the Gothic turn towards greater artistic naturalism. Implied by the nature-naturalism pairing is the notion that less naturalistic representation in turn signals a disinterest in the natural world, or even environmental hostility. This paper takes as its subject an artist’s model book, made c.1200 in southern Austria and bound alongside some of the most popular twelfth-century texts on learning, labor, and comprehending the sensorial world. The book’s illustrator used an unquestionably non-naturalistic style of figuration and, through an unusual visualization of the mechanical arts, frames his relationship to Nature as grounded not in mimesis, but in the creative act itself. By disentangling observation and representation from attention to the natural world, this paper seeks to add artistic craft to the list of approaches to medieval environments.

What is arboreal Christianity, if anything? What might it be in late ancient and medieval worlds? This short introduction (which no-one asked me to author) searches among leaves and hollow trunks, roots and canopies. Is premodern religion relevant to trees—or vice versa? How did trees behave in religious contexts, and how did they interact with other beings and non-beings? Drawing on a few historical examples, I argue that there is something modern humans have overlooked in religious stories and theologies, as we have been reclining in the shade of a larger crown.  

The introduction ends with an appendix on method.

Investigation of climate proxy data has expanded dramatically, giving us an increasingly detailed understanding of large-scale climate patterns in medieval Europe. But we all know that climate change is not experienced at human scales.  In this talk, I will scale the question back down to a more intimate scale, looking at the words and experiences of Gregory of Tours. Building on work in the environmental humanities and the history of the senses, I will explore what people felt as they moved through the daily and seasonal fluctuations of their lived environment. I hope that this perspective will help us put the human experience back in the foreground of larger climate history discussions.

On Iceland, no architecture from the Middle Ages survives, and the extant art corpus is modest. The Icelandic sagas are astounding cultural monuments on an island where climate has rendered all historic architecture, and most material culture, ephemeral. Yet, by privileging texts, themselves in many cases a well-disguised pastiche of fragments, we risk losing access to the stories that objects can tell. We sideline the archive that is the land. At the turn of the first millennium, a group of Icelandic chieftains agreed to a Christian baptism at the urging of the Norwegian king. Kristni saga’s account offers a tantalizing peek at the ritual, which took place at a hot spring, Vígðalaug. This narrative invites an art historical method of studying the relationship of scant natural resources to a process of acculturation. Vígðalaug is a geothermal pool, and it is a baptismal font—a medieval object. Through the lens of the contested resource, we can see the way that Vígðalaug is both landscape feature and cultural object, and how it was both witness to and agent of negotiations of medieval Nordic power.

The cosmography of the thirteenth-century polymath Qazwini tells us that lead is to be found under mountains near Shash (modern Tashkent) as well as in mines near Mount Damavand in Iran. It is generated, he believed, from the “cooking” of impure mercury and sulphur underground at those sites. For Qazwini, writing in Iran during the Mongol invasions, Damavand was a storied but real place while the mountains of Shash were terra incognita. However, recent advances in lead isotope analysis have revealed that medieval slipware ceramics excavated in Kazakhstan use lead in their glazes that came from the Tianshan mountains, confirming that lead from Transoxiana was indeed traded over large distances. The study of metals in Islamic art history has to date focused on precious metals and their alloys. Yet lead, for Qazwini and other medieval authors, was an extremely important substance: one of the seven malleable minerals, it was also understood to be an aid to the production of other substances, a sealant, an alloy, an ingredient in glassmaking, and a medium for the production of talismans. This paper considers lead’s role in the medieval Islamic tradition as a weighted substance of the earth, mined out from mountains and capable of directing the forces of the universe through occult manipulation.

From rhythms of desertification, to migrating elephant populations; from Mande blacksmiths’ fuel consumption in the precarious Sahel, to the botanical lifeways of both colonizing elites and enslaved populations: my intention in this paper is to present a series of case studies of the environment inflecting the material histories of Africa contemporaneous with the European Middle Ages. In attending to such case studies, I hope to offer a range of methodological approaches to inspire further research.

In medieval Chinese tales, trees talk and plants hear. For example, a tree spirit might appear in a dream to offer guidance, or it might talk to another spirit and be overheard by a sleeping human. Trees also grow and wither in response to human speech and action. Stories recount how wood resists axes and how sap runs as red as blood. In this paper I will consider all of these as communicative acts, drawing on recent work in biosemiotics by Melissa Leach, James Fairhead and Wendy Wheeler. Although biosemiotics has largely been theorized through contemporary anthropological fieldwork, I will propose that it can also provide a methodological resource for thinking through medieval literature in a way that takes seriously the possibilities of speaking, hearing, and reading signs across human/nonhuman boundaries.

The medieval monastery of Geghard is inextricable from the land of the Armenian highlands. Carved into the base of the Geghama Mountains where a natural spring flows into the Azat River, Geghard recedes into its natural surroundings. Inside, the architectural forms echo its geological setting: roughly hewn walls mimic the raw rock of caves, while muqarnas vaults evoke growing stalactites. Deep in the caves, a relief of an ibex signals connections to the high-altitude meadows above, where ecclesiastics and seasonal pastoralists led herds of sheep and goats to graze among their wild ancestors. There, just below the snow-capped peaks, ancient stelae guarded glacial lakes like stone dragons. As the sojourners returned to the Azat river below, they brought these dragons with them, reinforcing the ties between the mountains and the gorge. By extending the study of Geghard outside the monastic walls, this paper reinscribes the deep ties between the monastery and its environs.

Over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Chinese painters working in the
“mountains-and-waters” (shanshui) genre developed a variety of new techniques for
representing their subjects. Foremost among these were new ways of using monochromatic ink
to convey the texture of rocks. While these texturing techniques would ultimately be
formalized into discrete typologies of texture strokes (cun), during the first centuries of their
history, they were less readily distinguishable from one another, and they varied remarkably
from painting to painting. Art historians have long characterized the widespread adoption of
these new texturing methods as one of the hallmarks of Song naturalism. But in addition to
making mountains more lifelike, texturing also introduced new visual ambiguities—most
notably, it made it more difficult to distinguish rocks in the foreground from mountains in the
background. This ambiguity conditioned viewers to see mountains less as mystical domains
beyond the artifice of humans, and more as structures that were miniaturized and replicated in
individual rocks. The rising popularity of the genre carried this conditioning into the increasingly
commercial dynamics of elite literati culture. In this paper, I explore some of the long-term
ecological consequences of this new way of sensing the fabric of the earth.

Pagodas, rock-walls, and wells are three examples of Buddhist engineering. They are found at Heart of the River Temple (Jiangxinsi) of Wenzhou, China, which rises from a semi-artificial island. Already in the early medieval, two small rocky islets in the Oujiang estuary were rhapsodized in poetry. Later, the local community built twin pagodas atop the twin islets, towers that served as spiritual and navigational beacons. Then, Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1162) took refuge in one pagoda during civil war, whereby he won a crucial naval battle. The imperial court sought to ennoble the islet, and the local community financed an earthworks project to unite the two islets and a nearby shoal into a single semi-artificial island in the heart of the river. Engineered by Chan monk Zhenxie Qingliao, a team of monks built underwater rock walls to capture natural sedimentation processes as well as blessings from Buddhist deities. Qingliao and others also dug deep wells to bring fresh-water above the brackish tides; recent field work has found the Buddhist prayers and blessings they carved into well walls. They constructed a grand Chan monastery with hundreds of residents that drew international pilgrims. Their enduring transformations of the estuary were the result of a combined physical and metaphysical engineering, or the overlapping magisteria of Buddhist engineering.

This paper examines animal branding in the medieval world as a material practice that unsettles the boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals. It argues that branded skins were sites where legal authority, environmental adaptation, and human–animal relations converged. Drawing on environmental history, animal studies, archaeology, and material culture, it reads brands as inscriptions that linked livestock to landscapes, pastoral mobility, and regimes of ownership. Rather than merely identifying property, branded animals embodied an economy of insignia in which marks mediated relationships between people, animals, and environments. Read through an environmental historical lens, branding reveals reciprocal forms that complicates conventional narratives of human dominion and foreground animals as active participants in medieval ecological and social worlds.