Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Center for History, Culture, and Environment (CHE), and the Department of History.
Please contact Professor Richard Keyser (rkeyser@wisc.edu) for the reading, an article about the intense competition for salmon-fishing rights in late medieval Scotland.
Present day fisheries scientists, managers, and other parties seek to join traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of indigenous cultures to what has been learned and understood by modern science. Yet TEK, always in some way local, was and is not unique to today’s traditional peoples. Even among self-consciously Christian medieval Europeans, elements of a general world view as well as particular understandings and procedures involving aquatic creatures and their capture, plainly not derived from prior written transmission, occasionally spread from oral culture into the surviving written record. Some such knowledge can even be shown to affect practices and regulations of medieval fishing. This talk will not appeal to the necessity of such knowledge as a prerequisite for known successful exploitation, but rather to evidence for acknowledged expert practitioners of resource use and management, and then to explicit descriptive, explanatory, and didactic statements that seem to reflect authentic medieval experience of nature, especially aquatic nature. The lecture will explore three general themes: the habitats and habits of fish varieties; a sense of natural limits to sustainable exploitation; and understandings of the nature and creation of fishes.
Professor Richard C. Hoffmann (Emeritus, History, York University) grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, then trained at Wisconsin and Yale in interdisciplinary medieval studies/economic history and spent his entire professional career (1971-2009) at York University in Toronto, evolving into a pioneer of medieval environmental history. His interest has always been in the lives and activities of ordinary medieval Europeans in their natural, material, and social worlds. He has authored 70 articles and chapters; 3 prize-winning books in the field; and most recently The Catch. An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge 2023). He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017. He takes equal pride in having mentored undergrads, post-grads, postdocs, and others who now hold tenured positions in 10 North American universities.
