Abstract This article examines the role of Cistercian nunneries in the creation and management of the hydraulic systems that dominated the landscape of the Low Countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such systems, comprised of a complex network of drainage ditches, canals, dams, embankments, and sluices, facilitated the reclamation and exploitation of lands and expanded the settlement of populations along the coasts. Acting primarily as agents of the counts of Flanders and Hainaut, Cistercian nunneries played a key role in this process as it evolved into the thirteenth century. By examining the full range of their involvement in this process, this article illuminates the interaction of Cistercian nunneries with the natural environment, their contribution to the local economy, and the extent to which they were integrated into the social and religious landscape of the region.
Abstract In April 1927, nine years after the Armistice Agreement of September 29, 1918, between the Allied Powers and Bulgaria, the city of Marseille solemnly inaugurated an imposing memorial, celebrating the first victory of France and its Allies in the Great War. Originally conceived as a monument of national recognition, the Monument aux morts de l'Armée d'Orient et des Terres lointaines underwent a double transformation of meaning: It has become both a symbol of Marseille's history of the Great War, evoking the city's contribution to the war effort, and a diplomatic tool for the promotion of French foreign policy in the Balkans.
Abstract This article examines how climate volatility affected urban governance in late medieval Paris (1364–1422), a period that coincided with the transition into the Little Ice Age. Drawing on narrative and administrative sources, the article argues that contemporaries experienced climatic instability primarily through material consequences: disrupted circulation, provisioning failures, and epidemic disease. These shocks destabilized the infrastructural foundations of urban life. The article shows that royal and municipal authorities responded through environmental governance, targeting all three infrastructural domains. These urban “healthscaping practices” treated infrastructure, water, markets, and public space as primary intervention sites under climatic stress. By integrating climate history with urban and political history, this study demonstrates that climate volatility shaped the timing, form, and priority of urban regulations in medieval Paris.
Abstract This article demonstrates how the late medieval French royal state and its subjects shaped and were shaped by the forest around the time of the Black Death, a turning point in both environmental and political history, when the impact of the plague collided with the growth of the late medieval state. The bulk of the essay traces the development of royal forest regulations from the early Middle Ages through the fourteenth century to demonstrate that increasing royal control over the forest was driven as much by fiscal, military, and ideological concerns as it was by demographic and ecological factors. As a case study of a town in the Languedoc shows, people could contest royal control by taking advantage of demographic and environmental change for their own purposes. However, the growth of the royal state may have circumscribed their agency as much as the regrowth of the forest enabled their activities.
