Abigail Agresta (George Washington University)

Miércoles 10 de mayo 2023 a las 18 horas

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived? In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? This talk, based on Abigail Agresta’s recent book The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia, will explore the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Andalusi rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period.

Valencia’s Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, this talk shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.

Bio:

Abigail Agresta is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She specializes in the history of the late medieval Crown of Aragon, with an emphasis on environmental history, urban history, and history of public health. She holds a PhD (2016) from Yale University, and previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her first book, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia was published by Cornell University Press in 2022, and was a finalist for the 2023 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History. She has also published peer-reviewed articles in Speculum, Journal of Medieval History, and Viator. Her current research project is tentatively titled The Rise of Quarantine in Late Medieval Spain.

DURACIÓN: 82 min