Part I. Air, Water, Earth -- In the Beginning ... -- Worshipping the Elements -- The Medieval Warm Period -- Harnessing the Elements -- Collaboration, or Exploitation? -- The Little Ice Age -- Earth, Wind, and Death -- Environmental Causes of the Plague -- Man-Made Pollution of the Environment -- The Poison Thesis -- Weather Magic -- Part II. Forest -- Pre-Christian Tree Cults -- Surviving Wildwood at the Start of the Middle Ages -- The Early Medieval Woodland -- An Era of Great Clearances? -- A Brief History of the Royal Forest of England -- The Evidence of the Eyre Rolls -- Managing the King's Woods -- Disafforestment and the Rise of Private Woodland -- The Management of Woods Elsewhere -- Shaping the Idea of Wilderness -- A Renaissance in Regrowth of the Forest? -- Part III. Beast -- Animals on the Farm : The Early Middle Ages -- Animals on the Farm : The High and Late Middle Ages -- Animals as Pets and Companions -- Animals of the Hunt : Origins of Medieval Hunting -- Animals of the Hunt : Deer and Other Game -- Animals of the Hunt : Romance vs. Reality -- Animals of the Hunt : Falconry and Fishing -- Animals and Disease -- Animals on Trial -- Animals in the Bed -- Animals and Magic -- Afterword
Summary
The Middle Ages was a critical and formative time for Western approaches to our natural surroundings.?An Environmental History of the Middle Ages is a unique and unprecedented cultural survey of attitudes towards the environment during this period. Humankind's relationship with the environment shifted gradually over time from a predominantly adversarial approach to something more overtly collaborative, until a series of ecological crises in the late Middle Ages. With the advent of shattering events such as the Great Famine and the Black Death, considered efflorescences of the clima
