The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability

By Annette Kehnel

Brandeis University Press 2024

Of ladies, cavaliers, of love and war,

Of courtesies and of brave deeds I sing

Thus opens Ludovico Ariosto, in Orlando Furioso, his superb epic poem steeped in the traditions of the European Middle Ages. In The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, Annette Kehnel sings of forgotten communal economies, of ecologically-minded fishers and Alpine shepherds, of proto-microfinance initiatives and mendicant friars well versed in the market processes of their day. An English language translation by Gesche Ipsen of a critically-acclaimed German study published in 2021, the book allows Professor Kehnel (holding a chair in Medieval History at the University of Mannheim for nearly two decades) to unsettle the tired notion of the Middle Ages as a benighted epoch where "our ancestors, beset by lice and parasites, live[d] above cellars in which their own faeces lay piled high."

Focusing on case studies in key industries and socio-economic settings of medieval Europe, Kehnel unveils a surprising abundance of experts in sustainability and "ecological economics", and sheds light on ways of living that anticipated modern lifestyle trends centuries before the popular imagination allows for their existence. Whether it be through medieval beguinages, "autonomous urban communities of women [that] held their own for centuries", taking part in financial markets and agricultural projects, or it be through the abundance of "cultural techniques of mending and repurposing", the book creates spaces where new reflections about our medieval past take roots, and surprising connections emerge that could potentially "help us think outside now defunct thought patterns." The beguines were "engaged in a form of economic sovereignty made possible only by their status as members of a beguinage" and the medieval menders and rag pickers were thriving in an economy that wasn't plagued by overabundance, when "techniques involving the sparing use of resources become obsolete."

Following the evolution of the fishing industry in Lake Constance, where "the fishermen used the lake’s resource ... efficiently for centuries, without causing a permanent decline in stocks" and the widespread repurposing in the textile and furniture markets, and even in pre-modern architecture, where "reusing recyclable materials was, simply put, the gold standard", creates indelible impressions of thriving environmentally friendly economies in an age reflexively pigeonholed as being under the sway of rapacious ecological plunder. Similarly, and perhaps in the most convincing study of the book, the section on the monti di pietà, literally 'mountains of pity', "communal credit facilities in the form of 'institutional' pawnbrokers", Kehnel outlines the measures taken in Renaissance Italy's cities to help the disadvantaged and marginalised groups on the financial markets, and argues for the presence of:

a socially and economically sustainable business model that lasted centuries, surviving crises, bankruptcies, revolutions and even Napoleon, simply because it fulfilled a crucial function, i.e. providing financial services to the socially and economically weaker members of urban society.

Taking in small pledges as collateral for small loans— there exists the record of a pledge of worn-out socks in exchange for six Bolognese pennies— these charitably-minded institutions show an astonishingly transparent urban market and a rarely seen side of medieval economy, and when paired with the book's proddings into the annals of financial archives of close-knit communities, show that

medieval societies were eager to enable and safeguard market participation for all: everyone owed everyone else, all kinds of credit instruments were available, and the capital markets were surprisingly accessible ... even a poor swineherd was regarded as a creditworthy member of society.

Unlike the faux-minimalism preached from the social media pulpits of modern day influencers, the book tracks the developments in medieval notions of minimalism and anti-wealth mindsets, and urgently argues in favour of the potential benefits that could be gleaned from such movements by an age choking itself to death on a fetid overabundance of trifles. Sensibly refraining from replacing one medieval stereotype, rampant greed and ecological exploitation, for another, pious distancing from the "vomit of fortune", the book presents these mendicant orders of the Franciscans and the like in all their complexity:

The very champions of a simple life without possessions turned into the most important economic theorists of the late Middle Ages, who developed guidelines for traders, merchants and entrepreneurs on how to balance profit with the common good, identified the pricing paradox, formulated early thoughts on marginal utility, and defined the properties of capital.

Energetically argued and traversing fresh lines of research traditionally ignored in histories of the time period, the book offers some sorely needed examples of historical sustainability for a self-complacent world content in careening towards ecological blight, and does so by borrowing light from the denizens of an age thought lost in darkness.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi