“Fishers, Pearls, and Walrus Teeth”! There is an intriguing title for a book of medieval history. Nikolas Jaspert rightly observes that modern writers see medieval seas as barriers and routes but ignore the contents of these water bodies. Arguing that oceans contain more than just the human, the Professor of Medieval History at Heidelberg promises instead to present “marine,” not merely maritime, history, for the Middle Ages. Following international, interdisciplinary, and sustainably-oriented approaches, Jasper explores the seas around fifth- through sixteenth-century Latin and Greek Christianity, the Arab and Muslim sphere, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe from perspectives of natural science, human meanings, exploitation, and cultural creativity (chiefly artistic). This is an ambitious (and notably for the author’s primary German readership) thoroughly innovative approach to the Middle Ages. Medievalists of all persuasions can and should also enjoy and benefit from the admirable result of wide-ranging reading and research. Across three multi-chapter thematic parts, Jaspert portrays life forms and natural treasures associated with the medieval sea.
The first part (chapters 1-3) examines medieval human views of the sea: as an object of cultural understanding and representation; as a venue where diverse social groups (fishers, artisans of tackle and boats, merchants, and fishmongers) sought a living from fish-centered work; and as the processes of capture, sale, and consumption which turned life forms from the sea into foods for medieval eaters. Discussion of the human food chain begins with conflicts over control of fishing rights and capture methods (including questions of sustainability) and goes on to regional dietary preferences and fashionable preparations, at least for well-to-do consumers.
The second part (chapters 4-7) is entitled “Real and Fictive Marine Life Forms.” The most important medieval fisheries in northern and southern waters exploited both predator (cod and tuna) and prey (herring and sardine) species, each with its own habitats and habits to which the human predators adapted in pursuit of human demand. As important as capture techniques were, the means medieval people developed for the preservation of their perishable bounty and its shipment to consumers at increasing distance (and hence time) from the vulnerable fish stocks were yet more significant. But medievals saw other marine organisms in more moral terms, thinking whales inherently evil threats to seafarers despite their potential use value (meat, oil, whalebone, etc.), and repeating ancient Greco-Roman representations of dolphins as friendly to humans. Such cultural assessments extended further to wholly imaginary creatures of the deep: sirens who tempted seamen to their deaths; sea monsters of immense size and horror portrayed in myths and on maps; mermaids and mermen with their own submarine societies mirroring those above the surface. And then there were the valuable ivory teeth of the walrus from the outermost northern edge of medieval awareness, the miraculous horn of the unicorn (precious specimens being, as is now known, the tooth of a narwal), and the fossil teeth of sharks then understood as those of a viper to be treasured as antidotes to poison or other physical dangers. Artistic and literary images alike gave material shape to fish taken for food in current fact and theological tradition and to the more purely cultural constructs, even some not entirely associated with the sea.
Part 3 (chapters 8-12) treats “treasures of the sea,” which range from several highly valued products from marine organisms, some not really marine, and even to the wholly inorganic. Mollusks laboriously gathered especially from southern waters yielded treasured pearls, more versatile lustrous mother of pearl, and the long-famous Tyrian (royal, imperial) purple dye associated since at latest Egyptian times with secular and spiritual majesty. The scents of fine medieval perfumes were then as now “fixed” with ambergris (literally “grey amber”), a substance that washed up in some seas now thought probably the effluent of a sperm whale’s indigestion. Whole sponges gently bathed the delicate bodies of medieval elites. Muslims and Christians alike adorned themselves and their sacral objects with red coral taken from especially southern Mediterranean coastal waters by adherents of both religions but traded notably by Jewish merchants. And from southern shores of the Baltic came the golden fossilized tree resin, known to Germans as “Bernstein,” literally “fire stone,” and in other languages as “yellow amber,” the latter usage having pirated the name from the Arabic for ambergris. The last substantive chapter treats the single most important medieval dietary supplement, condiment, and preservative, salt, sourced by solar evaporation in southern maritime areas as sea salt, but elsewhere long from brine springs or mined from rocks, and always an entirely inorganic material.
No eclectic medievalist can be other than fascinated, but what does all this mean? The 12-page conclusion (465-73) begins with a bit of a pun: “Meer oder weniger Mittelalter” [“more or lesser Middle Ages”], seen by the author as an Einordnung [“Setting all in order,” organizing it all] in a present-day context of doubt regarding human relations to the natural world, a fear of “time out of joint,” his intent being to establish a vital connection between humans and the sea. Today’s popular interest in the sea has inspired the “Blue Humanities” and similar “environmental turns” in the Humanities. This proposition seems primarily directed at a “terrestrial” German readership and its traditional vision (except for interest in the Hanse) of the Middle Ages as a terrestrial civilization. Jaspert would seek to reform this attitude.
The author thus presents his book as taking a position on the Middle Ages viewed coming “from the sea,” so changing the basis for understanding its period [cultures?] and notably its seas. His history, says Jaspert, is neither on (am) nor upon (auf) nor over (über) the sea, nor a history ofa sea (compared to Braudel’s Mediterranean). It is rather a history “out of” (aus) the sea, and pertains to the Blue Humanities, which includes the natural sciences and post-human aspects, so exploring the interplay between beasts and humans. This, he continues, contributes to “material studies”: where the non-human has agency not intentional but rather one which both permits and limits human practices and activities. Things of nature are not merely to be seen as objects of human practice, but as unconscious participants in history. Hence, the author wishes readers to be mindful of human dependency on the natural world and of the relationship (not really defined here) between social and biological spheres.
This advancing of a methodological and even philosophical thesis [or is it purpose?] is not presaged by the book’s introduction nor clearly foreshadowed in the ensuing four hundred pages of text. It certainly coincides with thinking and writings of present-day environmental historians working in German as well as English, though on such issues less confined to animals and probably less familiar to the author. Rather than reinventing this approach, Jaspert could enlist the aid of practicing environmental historians such as Karl Appuhn, Martin Knoll, Christian Pfister, Christian Röhr, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Paolo Squatriti, or Verena Winiwarter, to name a few with premodern European credentials. Ideas arising from terrestrial matters can help integrate thoughts on marine topics, too. Personally, this reviewer would have preferred finding this discussion in the book’s introduction so its relevance could clearly have informed treatment of medieval encounters with fishes, marine mammals, and even invertebrates or the usefulness of salt. Such a framing might also allow recognition of climate, hydrological, and geological features of the seas with which medieval people unknowingly but no less necessarily engaged. The latter might more clearly justify the chapter about salt and resolve apparently incompatible grounds for including both the unicorn horn and Baltic amber, for all their likely reader interest.
Physical inconveniences for readers are perhaps more to be attributed to the publisher than the author. Profuse and useful visual illustrations appear in a separate section of 21 color plates, but 42 black and white reproductions are scattered throughout, sometimes far from the references in text. About 150 items appear in the selected bibliography (9 pages) while literally hundreds more are available only in a 145-page online listing that is hard to find and unsearchable for curious or expert readers. Careful students of what is indubitably an interesting, invaluable, and highly recommended volume are forewarned.