The immediate material discontinuities late antiquity brought to Europe’s environmental relations were matched by cultural transformation. In diverse ways, including some that have no connection to what this book explores, classical Mediterranean civilization broke up and vanished, leaving behind only cultural relicts to influence its successors in Byzantium, Islam, and medieval western Christendom. Indeed, while by the eighth century this last was defining itself as Christian and ‘Roman’, what members of this culture meant thereby referred as much to use of the Latin language and Latin letters by the literate elite as it did to the general respect, but not authority, they acknowledged to the bishop of Rome, the Pope, as successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ. Westerners shared certain seminal assumptions about the nature of culture, the place of humankind, and the quality of human connections to other things. Some of their assumptions were of Christian origin, others were much older and deeper but now most commonly expressed in Christian terms. Matters metaphysical have little relevance here; ontology and philosophical essentialism are not to be conflated with examining how medieval cultures interacted with the world of natural causality. This chapter seeks to establish how medieval people thought about their relationship to God’s Creation as they understood it, and notably how their evident thinking meshed with their experience and activities in the material sphere. In terms already introduced, a primarily emic probe into medieval minds is thus glossed with etic views of medieval behaviour.

It is important to recognize that the European Middle Ages lacked self-conscious or even coherent tacit discourse on relations of humans to nature or on nature as an entity, to say nothing of such concepts as environment or ecology, both of which are modern, not medieval, ideas. As in classical antiquity, to look for them as such in medieval Europe is to risk wishful self-deception.