Crafts and Cleanliness: The Regulation of Noxious Business Activity in English Towns During the Fourteenth through Sixteenth Centuries

sanitation

Through a study of English town government sources, this chapter argues that local authorities in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries regulated craft businesses with an eye on their outputs to the environment that could have detrimental health effects. Textile manufacturing, leather working, and brewing—three significant urban craft activities—were the target …

Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices.

reflections

This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake …

Bettering stories about stories about nature

extinction / reflections

Both environmental historians and ecocritics are in the business of simultaneously analysing the stories we tell about the human-nature relationship and creating those stories. Using the case of Kiki, an Aldabra giant tortoise on display in the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, I present three potential text types in …

Tracking Animals in a Pandemic

reflections

The global pandemic puts a spotlight on human-animal relations and how human histories are intertwined with animal bodies. Environmental historians have demonstrated a steadily growing interest in investigating animals since the late 1980s, so thinking about animals in historical terms is nothing new. But our COVID-19 moment can prompt us …

Controlling Pigs in Countryside and City for Sustainable Medieval Agriculture

medieval resources

Domesticated pigs (Sus scrufa) were an integrated component of medieval food production in both city and countryside. This chapter examines strategies for managing pigs in a sustainable fashion in the Middle Ages, with a focus on England and neighbouring Normandy. The chapter argues that limitations were placed on where, when, …

Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging

books / extinction / restoration

This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, I use the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an …

Dependence on the whale: multispecies entanglements and ecosystem services in science fiction

extinction / science fiction

Abstract: This article analyses how four science fiction stories frame whale endangerment and salvation as a problem of ecosystem service loss: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range (1957), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), the Doctor Who episode ‘The Beast Below’ (2010), and T.J. Bass’s The Godwhale(1974). It uses the four categories of the scientific concept …

Aesthetics of energy landscapes

reflections

Abstract: Energy landscapes are entangled with technological infrastructures. Interro- gating these infrastructures is a critical move for the environmental humani- ties, as these infrastructures carry ideas as well as power across the landscape. One of the main ways in which infrastructures can be interrogated is through aesthetics, particularly the visual …

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