Uplands

Medieval uplands—landscapes dominated by hills and mountains—are often assumed to have been backwards or primitive areas, dismissed in the historiography in contrast to lowlands, their more sophisticated and urbanised counterparts.Uplands—the first comparative history of upland societies and ecologies in early medieval northwest Europe—shows this to be far from the case. Considering hilly and mountainous regions such as the Ardennes, the Black Forest, Dartmoor, the Eifel, Exmoor, the Odenwald, and the Vosges, the book pursues several important questions: what can we know about the hilly and mountainous ecologies of northwest Europe and the human societies dwelling in them during the early Middle Ages? How much did the physical geography of uplands influence and orient human activities and social organization? How different, if at all, were these ecologies and societies from those predominant in lowlands? Were there connections between uplands and lowlands? Did upland ecologies and societies follow general trends and similar tendencies in the early Middle Ages or only distinct historical trajectories? How did early medieval societies perceive uplands? Did technological innovation, social and cultural change, or climate dynamics have an impact on these regions in the early middle ages? To answer these questions, this book mobilizes geoarchives, archaeology, and textual evidence, as well as the most innovative contributions from recent scholarship. In doing so, it profoundly challenges inherited national and European models of settlement history and geography. A thorough discussion of British, German, and French historiography identifies these tensions, revealing that more than one historiographic theme is deeply rooted in nationalist, colonial, and romantic worldviews. Building on this conceptual mapping, the book presents a renewed framework for the comparative study of early medieval ecologies and societies. It defends historical ecology as a radical alternative to methodological nationalism and nature-culture dualism.