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Bruce M.S. Campbell, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, by Richard C. Hoffmann, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1537–1538, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev303
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Extract
Although well established in North America and now an active area of postgraduate research in Europe, environmental history scarcely yet features in the undergraduate curriculum of UK university history departments. Were it taught, Richard Hoffmann’s book would show what a fully developed course might look like. This is unsurprising, for the book’s origin is a course successfully taught by Hoffmann at York University in Canada. It contains the wisdom, and embodies the experience, gained from a career spent presenting this most interdisciplinary of subjects to classes of humanities students shy of science and nervous of numbers. The result is an accessible, readable and thought-provoking book with which any historian, environmental or otherwise, ought to be able to engage. In place of the numbers, tables (none) and graphs (just two) favoured by natural scientists, Hoffmann deploys an eclectic array of illustrations, diagrams and maps, a host of intriguing case-studies, and a telling turn of phrase. In his avowed aims to bring ‘the natural world into the story as an agent and object of history’ and to demonstrate that ‘nature mattered’ (p. 3) to medieval Europeans, he prudently adheres to the paradigm with which his intended audience is most familiar. Nevertheless, it is ecology—‘the ecological principle recognises the interconnectedness of living and non-living things through various relationships, processes, and cycles’ (p. 6)—that shapes his agenda, informs his analyses and furnishes him with an especially effective terminology. Thus, writing of a millennia-long era extending from the decline of Rome to the discovery of the Americas, during which empires fell, peoples migrated, cultures clashed, classes conflicted and populations crashed, Hoffmann resists the temptation to talk of crises, revolutions and Malthusian over-population and speaks instead of instability, unsustainability, resource conflict, over-exploitation, overshoot and tipping-points. The terminology may be unfamiliar (a glossary would have helped) but it helps him produce a text devoid of the twin environmental sins of determinism and sensationalism.
