[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The majority of the 2021 volume of Antiquité Tardive is dedicated to the theme of “Homme et “Nature” dans l’antiquité tardive,” consisting of ten contributions along with a historiographic and methodological introduction and a conclusion. Following the other conventions in reviewing these thematic volumes (for example, the review of Antiquité Tardive vol. 25 in BMCR 2019.06.27), we limit the review to the contributions on the theme (pp. 23–167).
These contributions engage with the various ways that the environmental histories (or perhaps, the “history of nature”) of Late Antiquity can be approached. The “Nature” in the volume title already suggests the first challenge, in that the notion of natura is polyvalent, and has a range of senses in Latin and an equally diverse sense of meanings in the modern languages of these contributions (French, Italian, and English). Together, they point to differences between classical and Christian understanding of the relationships between humans and the natural world, as well as changes within the late antique environments.
In their introduction, François Baratte, Gisella Cantino Wataghin, and Eleonora Destefanis review the evolution of the understanding of “natural” environments from their origins in ancient philosophy and science, which shifts through the lens of Christianity in which nature can come to mean something created, especially in late antique and medieval contexts. Citing Pliny’s Natural History and the connection it makes between the natural world and ancient economy, the authors note the difficulty in weaving together different modern perspectives on human-landscape interactions from archaeology, history, and the natural sciences. Following an overview of different historical approaches to past nature, it concludes by returning focus to the contributions of the volume on the mentality, language, and rhetoric around the interconnectivity between past humans and their environments.
In the first article, Cantino Wataghin explores the awareness of the “natural” world first through the Itinerarium Egeriae, the fourth century pilgrimage narrative. She identifies a connection between the narrator’s sense of scripture and the narrator’s experience travelling while noting that specific appreciation of nature here is unique among the period’s sources. In a few other examples, the article highlights how spontaneous natural experiences could be reworked with rhetorical framework to fit stereotypes, how natural exploitation was central to the identities of late antique landholders, and finally how Christian authors often used elements from the natural world as part of literary devices to redirect focus to humans and human activity.
The second and third contributions turn to engage with archaeological and palaeoecological sources for landscape and environmental change focused on Northern Italy and the Kvarnder archipelago in Croatia. Although centered on material evidence, both extend interdisciplinarily to reevaluate the changes in human-environment relationships over time. For Italy, Fabio Saggioro uses a range of landscape archaeology and palaeoecological material on three case studies of early medieval sites in the Po basin to argue that, during this period, there was a “progressive consolidation” of human-environmental interactions concerned with optimization. In the case of the islands of the Kvarnder archipelago, Čaušević-Bully et al., on the other hand, bring into focus a range of insular Adriatic ecologies, including for example, a palynological analysis from the lake sediment of Cres that reveals different post-Roman periods, the first from 300–550 with the rise in proxies from animal husbandry at the expense of cereal production, and a second from 550–800 which witnessed an abandonment of livestock and variation in cereal and grape production. While the material and environmental data help to illuminate past exploitation and environments, changes in them did not seem to have close relationships to wider regional drivers.
The next section takes a community-first focus on late antique environmental change. Starting with disasters, Hendrik Dey and Paolo Squatriti argue that late antique cultural (during the long ‘fall’ of Rome and the process of Christianization) and environmental (associated with the Late Antique Little Ice Age) conditions primed individuals to see catastrophe around them. Yet, in actual practice, communities demonstrated their resiliency to a range of disasters; the authors point to the case of Caesaria, which following an earthquake and tsunami in 749, within a generation found the affected areas of the city rebuilt and revitalized. Phillippe Leveau also engages with the debate surrounding the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) in the fifth contribution. The author argues that the climatic shifts associated with LALIA may be overstated for the mediterranean, especially regarding their contributions to the historical “fall of Rome.” The root problem, as Leveau sees it, is a form of interdisciplinarity that results in “the merging of disciplines,” and the author instead suggests enlightened disciplinarity, a “multidisciplinary” approach that respects the nuances of the climate indicators favored by different fields. In the final chapter of this section, author Paolo Maranzana turns to Anatolia to demonstrate settlement patterns in the context of climate change. In focusing on Galatia, Maranzana argues that its residents largely responded to changing climate via adaptation, and further states that anthropic factors such as socio-political, economic, or military change likely played a larger role in the region’s settlement patterns than climate.
In the fourth section, the volume pivots directly towards cultural interpretations of nature. In her contribution, Eleonora Destefanis strives to situate the flood narratives of Gregory the Great and Paul the Deacon within the larger framework of the literary sources and archaeology of Northern Italy. Destefanis contends that these narratives were written with specific moral-eschatological intention, and that they, when considered in that context and alongside other writings and archaeological evidence, reveal a complicated anthropic landscape in which the relationship between aquatic bodies and the communities seeking to control them form just one part. The next contribution to the volume turns to artistic representations of nature in medieval manuscripts as Francois Baratte posits that medieval manuscript artists had little interest in portraying the “real” environment, only presenting it in detail if it was a primary focus of a work. Baratte focuses on illustrations in manuscripts of the works of Virgil, comparing them with other types of art focusing on the same natural subjects concluding that manuscript artists were less concerned with natural details than might be expected for luxury items.
The final two contributions reflect on spiritual perspectives on the natural world moving from pagan interventions on natural philosophy to the Christianization of thought to the importance of nature for monastic communities. Giovanni Filoramo traces the issues related to the origins of “nature” in an early Christian context—both Latin and Greek—still in negotiation with pagan philosophy but with a radically different worldview. The early monastic worldview, on the other hand, approached specific environments not only for their benefit towards contemplation, but also for spaces designated by the sacrality. Laurent Ripart’s chapter explores the notion of desert within a western monastic framework, used to demarcate spaces—especially monasteries—as isolated from material demands while following the tradition of sacred spaces, notably those of eastern desert fathers.
Together, these contributions demonstrate the variety and vitality of different approaches to nature—either elements of the natural world or the environment—found in the study of Late Antiquity. The richness in sources, from texts and manuscripts to archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies, does not lend itself to easy synthesis, and instead typically offers more questions than answers. Yet, in his conclusion to this collection, Hervé Ingelbert explicitly remarks on the ways in which the varieties of human-nature interactions lend themselves to new forms within established categories during Late Antiquity: land once considered marginal became a source for new resource; “wild” zones—those outside of human interests—became desired by monks for their solitude; and classical dichotomies of human and nature become woven through Christian theology and worldview, for example. The takeaway from this volume, then, is that this period marks a number of different entanglements between humans and nature, which become visible not only through a range of methodological approaches but even in the questions we ourselves can ask.
Table of Contents
François Baratte, Gisella Cantino Wataghin, and Eleonora Destefanis, “Introduction – Historiographie et méthodologie”
Gisella Cantino Wataghin, “Uomo e «natura» nella tarda antichità: rappresentazione e Percezione”
Fabio Saggioro, “Archeologia del paesaggio e relazioni uomo-ambiente: risorse, natura e luoghi in Italia settentrionale tra V e X secolo d.C.”
Morana Čaušević-Bully, Charly Massa, Marine Rousseau, Vincent Bichet, Hervé Richard, and Mario Novak, “L’homme et son environnement. L’approche interdisciplinaire sur l’évolution des territoires insulaires de l’archipel du Kvarner (Croatie)”
Hendrick Dey and Paolo Squatriti, “Late antique “natural” disasters: de te fabula narratur?”
Philippe Leveau, “Le climat et l’Antiquité Tardive : ses restitutions par les Modernes et sa perception par les Anciens”
Paolo Maranzana, “Climate and the end of Antiquity: an answer from western-central Anatolia”
Eleonora Destefanis, “Il controllo delle acque fluviali nell’Italia settentrionale (IV-VIII secolo): spunti di riflessione, tra fonti scritte e documentazione archeological”
François Baratte, “Représenter la nature: l’exemple des manuscrits”
Giovanni Filoramo, “Imago naturae. Cristiani e pagani a confronto nello specchio della natura (IV-V secolo)”
Laurent Ripart, “Le désert des moines latins”
Hervé Inglebert, “Conclusions”