NATURE, CULTURE AND SOCIETY: THEMES IN EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

This course is an educational activity for the Master’s Degree/Laurea Magistrale in Environmental Humanities. It is an introduction to the growing field of environmental history and explores how human society and culture, non-human actors, natural elements, and medicine, science and technology shaped the European past in its broader global context. We will look at how human societies, animals, microbiota, and food plants have acted as agents in the past, from the local to the transnational level, over a broad time span, c.1500 - c.1850.

- To be able to situate local experience, perception, and causes of environmental change within a broader context
- To be able to discuss historical events through the lens of how human relationships with nature and the environment have changed
- To have developed analytical and critical skills in the use of historical evidence and in the uses other scholars have made of them, in terms of methodologies and approaches

There are no prerequisites for this course besides the ability to read and speak English, in order to read the materials and take an active part in the discussion, and an enthusiasm and readiness to engage with historical discussions and readings.

The course looks at some of the major events and turning points in environmental history, over the ‘extended’ modern period of 1500-1850. It explores the role of humans, governments, states, medicine, science and technology, as well as animals and food plants in shaping the European environment. We shall understand how human and non-human actors have been agents in history and will also learn to do history at a different temporal and spatial scale. From the local to the transnational, we shall interrogate the changing relationships between nature, culture and society, focusing on the thematic categories of epidemic disease, changing foodways, and resource management (water).

McNeill, William 1976, 1998. Plagues and peoples. New York.
Gentilcore, David 2016. Food and health in early modern Europe. London.
Crosby, Alfred 1973, 2003. The Columbian exchange: biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Wesport CT and London.

Additional readings will be provided throughout the course and/or be made available through Moodle

Seminar participation
Oral presentation
Book review
Oral examination

Lectures
Seminars based around primary and secondary materials
Oral presentations

English

The course will be delivered in English

oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Natural capital and environmental quality" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development