I saw a post by @monsterblogging stating that an important step in decolonizing Fantasy is to recognize how "wildly anti-environmental" Europeans became, with the near extinction of wolves through hunting in england used as an example. The post linked to this article: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/wolves-in-britain which says that the mass-hunting and demonization of wolves was started by the normans to protect sheep flock which produced valuable wool.
and this mentality was carried by white people everywhere they colonized—seeing any animals thats mildly challenging to humans as something thats degraded, unpersoned and killed off or contained in the deep wilds.
This post made me ponder when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe, and what where the factors behind its development. Can i ask for your opinion as a medievalist and historian in this subject?
...Well. For starters, the linked post is just, uh. Wrong. On several levels. In several ways. Before I get to its facts, falsehoods, and assumptions, let's start with one of the problems involved in citing it as a source on history: it's written by a retired veterinary nurse. I'm sure that Debbie Graham (retired veterinary nurse) has done many wonderful things in her career. I'm reasonably sure that we'd be in sympathy politically, and would get along if we found ourselves on the same protest line or weekend hike. But uh. As a set of historical claims, this is egregious.
For one thing, it is either disingenuous or breathtakingly stupid to take the wolf as a stand-in for "the environment," full stop. The wolf is the most culturally iconic predator of the western world. At the risk of seeming flippant: the wolf, which lives in a cave and eats 10,000 sheep per year, is an outlier adn should not have been counted. There are good essays about what is going on with the wolf in literature and culture, both in the Middle Ages and beyond, in this book, via @jstor.
Was there hostility toward wolves in the European Middle Ages? Sure. Arnaud, a fourteenth-century French peasant, is famously on record as a heretic because he concluded that wolves were not created by God. (But... everything is created by God, said a presumably very frazzled member of the clergy. That's kind of a big deal.) Arnaud, however, was a shepherd, and he stuck to his story: God was good, wolves did nothing but eat sheep and lie. Evil. Therefore of the devil. QED. Arnaud eventually conceded that the devil could not create things and that even wolves were created by the Almighty.
Anyway. There are just a shocking number of fallacies and errors in that article. It wants to claim that wolves were hunted to near-extinction by the Normans, while also pointing out the ways in which the Normans placed limits on hunting. The article also conflates the rhetorical/literary wolf (enemy of sheep, humans, Good Things Generally) with the actual wolf, and claims that "This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people believed that stabbing, beating, flaying, burning and poisoning wolves was good." From the bottom of my heart: what the fuck. I know what was "babbled from every pulpit" in medieval England. Greatest hits include:
the Virgin Mary has your back
do not play dice in the cemetery / in church / with money you don't have
consider that you are, in fact, sinful
do not be too anxious about your soul, though
do not have sex during Lent
...no seriously, we mean it, no sex during Lent
Anyway: there's not some weird pulpit-thumping anti-wolf brigade. The article claims that church and civic law permitted and rewarded killing of wolves. Common law in England? yes. Church law... I have never heard of such a thing, nor can I imagine any document saying "40 days off purgatory if you -- with the right spirit in your heart -- come hear a sermon, donate to the roof repair fund, or kill a wolf." In the immortal words of Benoit Blanc, it makes no damn sense.
The linked article writes of "things called fields, impounded [sic; not actually what that word means] by structures such as fences or hedges." I think the enclosure movement of the 14th-17th centuries (late medieval/early modern) can certainly be viewed as bad for the ecosystem of England. But that's about pasturage, not arable fields. Not coincidentally, it helped to fuel Robin Hood legends. Moreover, one can also find fenced-in fields in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, etc. Fields are not inherently colonialist.
You say you are pondering "when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe." My answer would be: it wasn't. A recent overview of environmental history in medieval Europe is this, examining sustainable practices and norms:
In this fascinating meld of history and ecological economics, the author uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable
Also via @jstor, there's the open-access book The Green Middle Ages, which argues that "the green earth was a generally treasured,
indispensable and integrated component of life." It makes its argument, in my view, cogently and well. Full book here.
Tired medievalist tip jar here.
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