Session 43: Medieval Environments I: Food Shortage and Subsistence Crises in Medieval Europe, Thursday, 10 am, Bernard 157

• After the “Fall”: Feeding Rome in the Early Middle Ages – Kathy Pearson, Old Dominion Univ.
• Shortages and Population Trends in Carolingian Europe, ca. 750–c.950 – Tim Newfield, Univ. of Michigan–Ann Arbor
• Alternative Consumption: Fodder and Fodder Resources in Late Medieval English Economy, ca. 1250–1450 – Philip Slavin, McGill Univ.

Session 88: Medieval Environments II: Religion and the Environment (co-sponsored with AVISTA), Thursday, 1:30 pm, Bernard 157

• The Lynn White Thesis: The View from Outside Medieval Studies – Elspeth Whitney, Univ. of Nevada–Las Vegas
• Holy Environments and Saintly Identity in Guillaume de Bernevilles’s La vie de saint Giles – Monica Ehrlich, Univ. of Virginia
• Gifts of Forest Rights to New Monastic Foundations in Thirteenth-Century Northern France – Constance H. Berman, Univ. of Iowa

Session 142: Medieval Environments III: Exploiting and Managing Animal Resources, Thursday, 3:30 pm, Bernhard 157

• The Prince, the Park, and the Prey: Hunting in and around Milan in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries – Cristina Arrigoni-Martelli, York Univ.
• Forgotten Landscape: An Environmental History Examination of Medieval Parks in Scotland – Kevin Ian Malloy, Univ. of Wyoming/Univ. of Stirling
• Hunting for Abandoned Medieval Industry: The Addition of Geo-Chemical Prospecting to a Historian’s Toolkit – Tyler Chamilliard, York Univ.

Session 344: Fifty Years after Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) III: The Mechanical Revolution (co-sponsored with AVISTA), Friday, 3:30 pm, Bernhard Brown & Gold Room

• Interlocking Structure of Agriculture, Trade, Shipping, Power, Corporality, and Escapement Images in the Pearl Poem – Martha Reiner, Florida International Univ.
• Just Add Water: How Industrial Mills Spurred the Economic Growth of the Cistercian Order – Christie Peters, Univ. of Houston
• Casting Aspersions: Fishing Rights and Twelfth- or Thirteenth-Century Mills in Northern France – Heather Wacha, Univ. of Iowa

Session 363: Teaching Environmental History: Interdisciplinary Approaches (A Roundtable), Saturday, 10 am, Fetzer 2030
A roundtable discussion with Richard C. Hoffmann, York Univ.; Alasdair Ross, Univ. of Stirling; and Janet Schrunk Ericksen, Univ. of Minnesota–Morris.

Some other sessions that might be of interest for environmental historians include:
Session 186, Friday, 10 am, Environmental Readings of Medieval Celtic Literature
Session 286, Friday, 1:30 pm, Fifty Years after Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) II: The Agricultural Revolution
Session 337, Friday, 3:30 pm, Natura Nova: Ecocriticism and Medieval Studies
Session 542, Sunday, 8:30 am, Women and Their Environments: Real and Imagined
Session 551, Sunday 10:30 am, Gardens and Nature in Medieval Italy

Conference registration is now open.

During the meeting, we will be collecting donations to cover ENFORMA’s membership in the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). Please give all donations to Ellen Arnold.

Two of these (Medieval Environments I-II) will be traditional paper sessions, providing a forum for the presentation of individual papers and the sharing of current research projects. This is a forum for new directions and new results; Congress authorities rightly expect that papers be essentially original and not repetitions of work already published elsewhere. Experience teaches that the most effective papers are solid expositions of work in progress, where presenters can get useful feedback from an engaged and broadly-informed audience.

The third session will be a roundtable discussion on incorporating environmental history in the medieval studies classroom. We hope to assemble a panel of 4-5 people to discuss their classroom experiences. Once the participants are established, we will plan the roundtable jointly. We are looking for both people who can address teaching specialized courses in medieval environmental history and people who can speak to the ways that environmental topics can be incorporated into general medieval surveys, through single day lesson plans or readings.

Ellen Arnold is organizing the sessions. Formal proposals must include an abstract of no more than 300 words and a completed Participant Information Form, which must also include your AV requirements. These forms are essential, as if we receive more proposals than we have space for, they will be forwarded for inclusion in the general program. The forms are now available on the congress website.

Proposals and PIFs need to be sent directly to Ellen Arnold by 15 September 2011.

We have no funds to help with travel or other expenses. The Kalamazoo Congress has very limited resources to help participants from outside North America. For information on travel awards, see: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/awards.html

We will be proposing a series of environmental sessions for Kalamazoo 2012. We will be proposing at least one pedagogy session, and people interested in this should share ideas for how that might be shaped. We welcome any scholars researching environmental aspects of the medieval world.  We encourage you to submit your own projects or encourage other colleagues or students to join our group.  Please feel free to pass this information along to others. This is a forum for new directions and new results, and we always welcome new people. Congress authorities rightly expect that papers be essentially original and not repetitions of work already published elsewhere. Experience teaches that the most effective papers are solid expositions of work in progress, where presenters can get useful feedback from an engaged and broadly-informed audience. Contact Ellen Arnold (efarnold@owu.edu) if you would like to participate in one of the environmental sessions.

Panel 2-A: Abigail Schade, Columbia University, Reading medieval water knowledge forward? Reading into al-Karaji’s 11th century instruction manual for Extraction of Hidden Waters

Panel 5-C: The European Experience with Sustainable Practices in the Late Middle Ages includes the following papers:

• Richard Hoffmann, York University, Reassessing ‘Ecological crisis in fourteenth century Europe’
• Tim Sistrunk, California State University-Chico, Defining sustainable practice in late medieval law
• Richard Keyser, Western Kentucky University, The keys to sustainability in premodern European woodlands
• Kimberley Kinder, University of California-Berkeley, A warmer, wetter world: Adapting to climate change in the Netherlands

Panel 6-C: Philip Slavin, Yale University, Between ecology and war: the fourteenth-century crisis in the British Isles

Interested colleagues can reach Dagomar  by email at dagomard@gmail.com.  The deadline for proposals is June 30, 2010.

The society’s call for papers is fairly rich with suggestions and widely disparate possibilities.  I, myself, hope to contribute something on “Regulating the Harvest in the Late Middle Ages”.  This will be legal material, but others should feel free to exercise their own peculiar passions.  If a narrower theme emerges from those interested, we can narrow the title of the session.  It appears that the conference organizers hope to accommodate different kinds of contributions in different venues, so no one should feel restricted by this panel appeal.  Panel submissions are due to conference organizers by June 30.  I would hope to have your contributions by June 20.  Please respond to Tsistrunk@csuchico.edu.

26-27 March 2010

Fourth International Conference of the Interdisciplinary Association “Gentes trans Albiam – Europe East of the Elbe in the Middle Ages.” To be held on the Keele Campus of York University, Toronto, York Research Tower 519.

Organized by the Department of History of York University, the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” (Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel) and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Landscapes can be defined, in the words of Denis E. Cosgrove, as “visibly distinct regions.” Landscapes can be understood as the natural environments in which a society is embedded, or as the set of representations with which members of a society observe and describe a region and give it significance. The idea of landscape is dependant on the one hand on the material reality of a given region, on the other hand on the sense attached to it by human beings beholding it.

Medieval Europe east of the Elbe presents a particularly interesting field for the investigation of landscape transformations. The area is characterized by many features that clearly distinguishes it from the Mediterranean regions throughout the Middle Ages – absence of Roman traditions, late appearance of Latin culture, colonization movement, chartered towns. There were generally independent developments concerning society, economy, and religion which led to the creation of a distinct cultural area. All of this makes this part of the European continent attractive for a consideration of large-scale and longue durée interactions between landscapes and societies.

The programme includes keynote addresses by Professor Piotr Górecki (University of California Riverside) and by Professor Jüri Kivimäe (University of Toronto), as well as 21 papers by presenters from Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Canada and the US in the fields of history, archaeology, palaeobotany, palaeozoology and musicology.

For information about the programme and registration please see the website of “Gentes trans Albiam – Europe East of the Elbe in the Middle Ages” (http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~aklammt/).

Main sponsors: Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” (Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel), German Historical Institute in Warsaw, Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

Conference Committee: Sunhild Kleingärtner (skleingaertner@ufg.uni-kiel.de), Sébastien Rossignol (rossigno@yorku.ca),  Donat Wehner (donatwehner@gshdl.uni-kiel.de)

Another centre of interest for Phoenix (as for the Portland meeting this spring) is the environmental history of war. Several panels were recruited for the Portland meeting but organizers were disappointed to have none but the most recent periods. If you have or want to develop a study on war and environment in early Europe, your interest will be most welcome. For now, contact Richard Tucker (rptucker@umich.edu) for further information, but he may pass you on to another committee member.

The conference is open to various formats of panels and presentations. All proposals will be received on line starting in March 2010. The deadline for submission is June 30, 2010.

Organizers of the Phoenix meeting have already planned extensive field trips to explore the desert in spring as well as other activities. The ASEH web site is www.aseh.net

• The emergence of environmental crises of the seas
• Phases of conservation of inland waters, seas, and coasts
• Historical perspectives on marine biodiversity
• History of whaling, fishing and overfishing
• Exploitation of marine resources, such as water, gas, oil, seaweeds, in the past
• History of marine pollution including material flows from land to sea
• History of maritime mobility
• Development of catchment areas as environmental and socio-economic systems
• Environmental history of urban coastal areas
• Landscapes and seascapes: changes in the environment and interpretations
• Islands and archipelagos as natural habitats and social communities

Medievalists might also consider such ideas as a set of papers relating human uses of the medieval Baltic and the medieval Mediterranean. Panels on other themes will of course also be supported.  Organizers have mentioned:

• Reconstruction of historical weather and climate, and adaptation to climate change in the past
• Environmental history of the polar regions
• Development of environmental movements
• Dimensions of forest history
• Urban environmental history
• History of man-animal relationship, food supply and biodiversity
• Industrial environmental history
• Production, consumption and waste: commodity chains in environmental history
• Cultural values and economic interests: retrospective environmental analyses
• Theories and methods in environmental history

Talk to colleagues in the medieval field and people who work on other periods, too. For details on submissions and other matters see the conference web site at http://eseh2011.utu.fi/ The deadline for submission is 2010 May 3, so you will have to make your arrangements before we gather in Kalamazoo. The ESEH web site is http://eseh.org

Here’s the CFP:
The International Water History Association organizes a Water History Conference in Delft, The Netherlands, in June 16-19 – 2010. The conference will be a unique opportunity to exchange existing and develop new insights on the history of our most precious resources. The conference is co-organized by IWHA, Delft University of Technology and UNESCO-IHE.

The deadline for sunmitting abstracts is January 15, 2010!!

A link to the online abstract submission page can be found at the website conference www.waterhistory2010.citg.tudelft.nl

The program committee welcomes abstracts for individual papers and proposals for complete sessions. Session proposals can either include three papers and a commentator or four papers. It is encouraged to include chairs in the session proposal as well. Proposals for double sessions are possible as well. The conference does not predefine topics for abstracts and sessions. Subjects and topics can range from rivers to drops, from seas to mountain lakes, from technologies to cultures, as long as the subjects are related to water (are “wet”) and historical.

All abstracts, both individual and from session proposals, will be reviewed by the program committee and should be submitted by the main author through the online submission system. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. In addition, session proposals (consisting of session title, 100 word description, names and affiliations of presenters and titles of their papers, names and affiliations of commentator and chair), should be send separately to the chair of the program committee Maurits W. Ertsen at m.w.ertsen@tudelft.nl

Decisions on acceptance are foreseen to be available on March 15th 2010. The final conference program will be available on May 15th 2010. To appear on the program, presenters with accepted abstracts need to register before April 30th 2010. Registration will open in January 2010