Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe: Interactions between Environmental Settings and Cultural Transformations edited by Sunhild Kleingärtner, Timothy P. Newfield, Sébastien Rossignol, and Donat Wehner (review)

What this volume does well is to call attention to the potential for interdisciplinary research to shine a light on the history of medieval Central Europe, especially on those regions and centuries lacking rich written source material. The list of methodologies employed in these articles is impressive. Broadly speaking, they include not just history (the study of written records) but also archeology, network analysis, and spatial analysis. More specifically, the articles discuss findings from such diverse fields as maritime archeology (the study of shipwrecks), metallurgy, settlement studies, archaeozoology (analysis of animal bones), the study of epizootic diseases, dendroclimatology (tree-ring analysis), palynology (pollen analysis), and archaeobotany (in this case, the study of the plant diets of the region’s inhabitants). What emerges from all of these articles is a tantalizing glimpse at how history can be combined with other fields to develop a remarkably rich picture of the ways in which medieval people interacted with the landscape—both natural and man-made.

This collection includes an introduction, fifteen chapters, and a conclusion. With the exception of one chapter written in French, the contributions are in English. Although many of the authors are not native English speakers, the quality of the writing is generally high, and most of the articles are clear—notwithstanding the occasional technical terminology.

Unfortunately, the volume struggles to maintain coherence while nominally attempting to address the broad theme of landscapes and societies. “Europe East of the Elbe” is a large and diverse region; the articles range geographically from northern Germany and Poland to Hungary and Russia. The three articles that focus on Schleswig-Holstein and the four that concern Poland do not communicate with one another as much as they could. In the conclusion, Rossignol acknowledges this problem by referring to the articles as “a series of vignettes . . . that, one could argue, are somewhat arbitrary” (379). This is a frustrating—but appropriate—description. Tellingly, the most thoughtful and challenging analysis of the volume’s subject matter is found neither in the editors’ introduction nor in Rossignol’s conclusion but in the opening pages of Piotr Górecki’s fine contribution about the Henryków Book as a source for environmental history.

Most of the contributors are to be applauded for their attempts to ask new questions using a mix of traditional and cutting-edge methodologies. The volume would have been better, however, if more of the articles were based on finished research. Many of the authors stress the preliminary nature of their findings, because there are more bones to count, more finds to date, and more data to collect in the field. Hopefully, polished end results will be published in a volume that more effectively ties together all of these scholars’ findings.