Sébastien Rossignol, "'Tenere suam aquam equo modo': Understanding the Urbanized Energy Landscape of Medieval Silesia"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Dr. Sébastien Rossignol, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Memorial University, kicks off the 2025-2026 Convivum series with “Tenere suam aquam equo modo: Understanding the Urbanized Energy Landscape of Medieval Silesia”.
Abstract
Urbanization was, in Central Europe of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the result of social, economic, and environmental engineering: it aimed at transforming societies, lifestyles, and landscapes according to the tenets of an agenda of melioratio terrae, or improvement of the land. Part of the landscape changes resulted from the growing demand for renewable energy to which the building of watermills responded. The human-made transformation of the water landscape required planning, led to conflicts, and changed the ways in which the environment was perceived. Based on SSHRC-funded archival research, this lecture will explore these transformations in the context of Silesia and the attitudes towards the environment that they reflected.
Biography
Sébastien Rossignol, Associate Professor of History at Memorial University, former Banting Fellow, former researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, is a historian of medieval Central Europe. He is the author of Medieval Silesia: An Inclusive History (Routledge, 2025) and co-editor of Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the Elbe (PIMS, 2013).