ÌÇÐÄTV

On 16^th May 2014, the University of ÌÇÐÄTV hosted the international conference “Geographies of Man. Environmental Influence from Antiquity to the Enlightenment”. “Geographies of Man” brought together researchers from all over Europe and the United States for a day of fruitful interdisciplinary conversation (for the full programme see ).

The conference was opened by Dr Vladimir Jankovic, senior lecturer at the University of Manchester and current President of the International Commission for the History of Meteorology, whose paper “On Climate Fetishism” shed light on the ideological assumptions and social implications of modern climatic discourse. Dr Jankovic’s keynote address was followed by four panels which explored different moments and topics in the history of environmental ideas, from classical Greece to eighteenth-century France. The first panel, “Ancient Environments: From the Divine to the Human”, traced the emergence of ecological and geographical discourse in classical Greece (Ellis) and imperial Rome (Kemp), also highlighting connections between enviromentalistic ideas and the conceptualisation of economic and military behaviour in Antiquity (Bonnier). In the afternoon, attention shifted to the late medieval and early modern periods, with a series of three panels on “Policing the Environment”, “Thinking Global”, and “Religion and Natural Philosophy”. The topics discussed were extremely varied: from Dutch public health schemes (Weeda), to Jesuit cartography in China (Chanis); from food and climate in Italian Renaissance philosophy (Muratori), to divine providence in the seventeenth-century English chorological literature (Beck); from notions of land use in the Diggers movement (Dodsworth), to maritime research in the Royal Society (Hellawell); from the legal implications of sudden environmental change (Johnson) to the role played by Montesquieu in constructing a concept of race (Cadelo-Buitrago). Overall, the conference made a significant step forward in rooting environmental ideas in their original social and historical contexts. It also richly documented the alliance between environmental discourse and various disciplinary fields (philosophy, science, economy, natural history, theology, medicine, cartography, etc.) across time and space.

 “Geographies of Man” was made possible by generous funding from the Humanities Research Centre, the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, the departments of Italian, History, and Classics, and the Royal Historical Society. The organisers (Sara Miglietti, Renaissance; John Morgan, History; Rebecca Taylor, Classics) would also like to acknowledge the valuable logistic support received from Ms Sue Dibben (HRC) and Ms Jayne Brown (Renaissance). A related event (“Ruling Climate. The Theory and Practice of Environmental Governmentality, 1500-1800”) will take place on the 16^th of May, 2015. For more information, see

Sara Miglietti