Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, Ad 750-900

ISBN-13: 9781316512869 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022

Paolo Squatriti

Opis

Presents a dynamic picture of early medieval Europeans struggling to control their ecosystems, and creating relationships with their vegetable environments.

Recenzje

'This is a brilliantly conceived book, which reveals the deep and tangled relationships between political thought and the natural world. The ways in which people think about 'good' plants and 'invasive' or 'bad' ones relates directly to their ideas about order, governance, and productivity; while these issues are of fundamental importance to society now, Squatriti shows just how much thinking around them changed in the Carolingian world. In between late Latin and vernacular, and between local practice and normative ideals, Squatriti reveals how words for weeds, explanations for their existence, tools for their removal (both physical and metaphorical) were tied to emerging forms of knowledge and authority. Squatriti's scholarly eye is omnivorous, and he draws comparisons, and seeks explanations in unpredicted yet outstandingly insightful places. This book draws with equal expertise upon archaeobotany, intellectual history, and religious reform literature to trace the ways in which ideas about everyday life, food, crops, and land management shifted in a new political world.' Caroline Goodson, University of Cambridge

Spis treści

1. Weeds, nature, and empire; 2. Weeds on the ground; 3. The time of weeds; 4. The worst of weeds; 5. The botany of paradise in Carolingian Rome; 6. The uses of weeds; 7. The politics of weeding in the Carolingian Empire; Epilogue.