| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe. Edited by John Howe and Michael Wolfe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. ix + 237 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, list of contributors, index. Cloth $59.95.
This volume challenges the widely but erroneously held belief that nature in the Middle Ages meant primeval forests. It demonstrates instead that medieval people created their landscape, and that the distinction between wilderness and cultivation was blurred. The articles encompass a wide range of topics from hunting to literary landscapes, arranged in an order ascending from the material to the spiritual.	1
The first section focuses on the management of landscapes. An essay on the English countryside by Oliver Rackham demonstrates that medieval England had no wildwood, but instead different forms of land management even on noncultivated land: heath, fen, moorland, grassland, and woodland. John Cummins studies the development of English deer parks, created for hunting as miniature ideal forests. Petra van Dam analyzes rabbit farming; the establishment of warrens in northern Europe led to the spread of rabbits, and with the promotion of rabbit meat for consumption, eventually rabbit fur also gained in popularity, replacing squirrel fur on the market. Karl Appuhn scrutinizes a report from 1442 on Venice's supply of firewood, which treated forests as part of the Venitian water management system, rather than in their own right.	. . .

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