Ebook: Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe: Interactions Between Environmental Settings and Cultural Transformations

'Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe' presents the results of the fourth international conference of the interdisciplinary project 'Gentes trans Albiam – Europe East of the Elbe in the Middle Ages,' held in 2010 at York University, Toronto. The fifteen essays included in this collection examine how historical landscapes were perceived, experienced and transformed in the middle ages, in a region that stretched from the lands of the western Slavs in the Elbe area to Livonia and Staraia Ladoga in the northeast and Hungary in the south. The book is organized into four parts, each covering a different region and era: Central Europe in the early middle ages; Wagria in the central middle ages; Silesia, Poland and Hungary in the high middle ages; and, lastly, the Baltic Sea area in the high and late middle ages.

Drawing on evidence from the fields of archaeology, history, palaeobotany and palaeozoology, the case studies in this book offer a close look at the many environments of Europe east of the Elbe, and at the continuing interaction between natural landscapes and their conceptual and cultural counterparts. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the collection highlights the impact of changes of patterns of settlement during both the transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages and the arrival of settlers from western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Over these historical periods, human beings transformed the physical landscapes – hydrological, zoological, botanical and epidemiological – at the same time as they reshaped the human geography of the region. 'Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe' shows the growing importance of environmental history to understanding medieval Europe.