Lecture | Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History
(Under)mining Preindustrial Europe: Ecology, Society and Culture, 1180-1550 CE
- Date
- Friday 24 October 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History academic year 2025 - 2026
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
Europe’s first mining boom began in the later twelfth century CE (~850 YBP), amid favorable climatic, political and demographic conditions. Despite its seemingly simple technologies and modest energy regimes, manual mining triggered a cascade of processes. These included altering ecologies and landscapes; stimulating migration; creating privileged occupational communities; prompting debates regarding the harms and benefits of ore extraction; and generating insights about humans’ place in nature more broadly. Nevertheless, the entangled biogeochemical, social and cultural legacies of manual mining remain largely obscure. There are both conceptual and methodological reasons for this neglect. Yet, as this paper will argue, by combining approaches across history, archaeology and the paleo-sciences, it is possible to acquire a fresh perspective. Evidence from several European mining districts, drawing on written sources, physical remains and their examination at the micro-, landscape- and regional levels, attest communities’ complex experiences of and approaches to the outcomes of non-mechanised mining. Interdisciplinary historical accounts of the era’s extraction are thus uniquely poised, first, to recast a “pre-industrial” industry as having long-term and often adverse consequences; and, secondly, to recover earlier societies’ ambivalence towards mining. Finally, an interdisciplinary approach to earlier mining history responds to calls for recontextualising the Anthropocene from a chronological standpoint within Europe, augmenting its more common critiques from beyond that region and in the aftermath of industrialization.
Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History
The seminars are informal and intended to foster discussion. There are drinks afterwards. Everyone is welcome to join.
If you would like to join a session, and/or receive invitations for the upcoming sessions, you can send an e-mail to: ngassistent@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Further information can be obtained from the organizers Shiru Lim, Judith Pollmann, Jeroen Duindam and Philippe Buc.