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Jan Brueghel the Elder, Great Fish Market, 1603
Research Question 2
How did socio-economic, cultural, and environmental forces enable and constrain marine exploitation?
5. Humans learned from and engaged with an unknown and often hostile water world and identified marine biodiversity as resources.
6. Complex cultural, socioeconomic and environmental contexts and forces enable and constrain marine extractions.
7. Marine food acted as a substitute to ameliorate subsistence crises (though with potentially notable access biases on a gender, class or regional basis.
Baleias em linhas de falha | Whales in fault lines
Baleias em linhas de falha | Whales in fault lines
Ancient whales washing ashore, dead or alive, in the Tagus River during the early modern period, either by casualty or in the upcoming of well-known natural disasters. In 1531, whale and earthquake converge and reflect, individually and together, human feelings and sensations that are reproduced in the most varied contemporary cultural products that cross the space of time. This particular event allows us to explore the past of the estuarine ecosystem, writing “new thalassographies”, “historicities” or fluid humanities, and including all the actors involved – people, other animals and physical space – in understanding a shared past. In this video we approach the multiple visions about the whale – the animal, the symbolic, the other, the useful, in a joint plot that gathers ecology, seismology, history and culture.
English Wheat and Herring Prices during the Great Famine of 1315-1329
Francis Ludlow, et. al.
Weather, Wheat and Herring were Interconnected in Medieval England, particularly during the fourteenth century when periods of flooding and famine caused agricultural and maritime commodity prices to fluctuate, leading to social unrest and conflict. The panels below provide empirical details of this phenomenon.
Impacts on the English-Scottish Borderlands “It wasn’t merely that those unlucky lands were subjected to all of the climate-caused disasters of those calamitous decades: their harvests lost to rain; their herds to disease; and their homes, churches, bridges, roads, and ports destroyed by one terrifying weather event after another, virtually every year between 1314 and 1321. The borderlands were a battleground for every kind of conflict of the era.”
– William Rosen (2014)
Nautical Cartography Cultures
The re-discovery of Greco-Roman geographical knowledge such as the maps of Ptolemy was practically useless for European oceanic explorers and navigators, like Christopher Columbus who in a quest in 1492 to discover a western passage to India, accidentally stumbled on the “New World.”
It was Arabic geographers like Al-Idris (AD1100–1165) who drawing on the languages of astronomy, geometry and oceanography crafted the nautical cartography eventually adopted by Western seafarers. Medieval Spanish and Portuguese seamen learned sailing techniques and charting from the work of Arabic Indian Ocean navigators Ahmad Ibn Majid (1432- 1500 CE) and Sulaiman al-Mahri (1500-1550 CE). Author of the fifteenth century Kitab al-Fatwa’id, (1490) a work describing the principals of seamanship, Majid, known as the “Lion of the Sea” was one of the first navigators to use a magnetic compass. Along with al-Mahri, he is credited with identifying the most important stars and constellations to determine a ship’s latitude at sea, as mandated by the Koran, Sura VI:97, “And He it is who appointed the stars to you, that you might guide yourselves by them through the darkness of land and sea” (Clark 1993; Lunde, 2005, 48).
In Northern Europe Netherlands was the leading innovative centre of nautical cartography and the “mapping impulse” that infused Dutch oversea colonial ventures in the seventeenth century is on display in Johannes Vermeer’s (1632-1675) The Art of Painting. In the work, a map tapestry hangs in the background of a scene depicting an artist painting a woman (Alpers, 1987). The map illustrates the “graphic means by which the land mass is set forth” in Vermeer’s work: “The Netherlands is at the edge of a ship-filled sea, framed by topographical views of her major cities, emblazoned with several cartouches” (Alpers, 1983, 120-121 cited in Grafton and Kaufman 1985, 262).
Sources
Alpers, S. 1987. ‘The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art’, in David Woodward (ed.) Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, pp. 51-96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clark, A. 1993. Medieval Arab navigation on the Indian Ocean: Latitude Determinations. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 113 (3): 360-373.
Grafton, A., and Kaufmann, T.D. 1985. Review of Holland without Huizinga: Dutch Visual Culture in the Seventeenth Century, by Svetlana Alpers. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, (2): 255-265.
Lunde, Paul 2005. The Navigator: Ahmad Ibn Majid. AramcoWorld. Vol. 56, (4) Houston, Texas. pp. 45-48.
Map of the Mediterranean from Tabula Rogeriana created by Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in 1154 and copied by Konrad Miller in 1929 who translitterated names in the roman alphabet. The map shows Croatia ("bilad garuasia"), Lombardy ("bilad ankbarda") and Calabria ("bilad kalauria").
In Johannes Vermeer’s work: “The Netherlands is at the edge of a ship-filled sea, framed by topographical views of her major cities, emblazoned with several cartouches.” With his depiction of the painter in his studio, Vermeer turns this genre painting into an allegory of the art of painting. His model is posing as Clio, the Muse of history, who inspires the painter and proclaims the glory of painting in the old Netherlands, which she has immortalised in the book of history.
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