Animals, ecology, and the rural social system: pastoralists and their Cistercian neighbours in upland southern France, 1100-1350

受中世纪动物和环境史创新领域的启发，我的研究旨在加强我们对中世纪动物如何被视为媒介的理解，当与生态系统结合时，它们是人类社会的组成部分。利用法国南部43座修道院的档案，这些修道院提供了丰富而未开发的多物种生命宝库，我想问一问，在共同进化的过程中，动物、生态系统和牧民社会制度是如何交织在一起的。我的研究采用了跨学科的方法，借鉴了考古学和人类学的知识，我的研究的中心贡献将是通过“纠缠”的镜头来描述法国南部的牧民生活，正如安娜·青所写的那样，这意味着研究“一系列开放的生活方式的马赛克”。因此，我的目标是使该地区经常由凯瑟尔人主导的英语国家的研究议程多样化，并通过一个结论，将法国的放牧实践置于全球中世纪牧业的比较框架中，为新兴的全球中世纪史学增添一笔，因为这个时代的特点是生活方式的“选择和实验”。我的研究建立在强调过去生态系统纠结性质的学术基础上。虽然中世纪的历史学家通常将动物作为经济体系中的物品，或者作为兽类或圣徒传记中的表现对象来讨论，但尖端的新研究将动物本身呈现为社会制度中的代理人。例如，杰米·克里纳的《猪军团》将猪描述为塑造了人类社会的多才多艺的动物，罗宾·弗莱明的《2022年福特演讲》将罗马英国描绘成一个以狗为中心的人兽世界。在这些学者之后，我的贡献将超越代表性，并将动物解释为不仅仅是人类经济的对象。通过研究中世纪法国牧业的纠缠性质，我将证明中世纪的动物是非人类的代理人，它们塑造了它们与之捆绑在一起的临时人类社会。这一令人兴奋的方法尚未应用于法国南部的西斯特尔档案，自1986年康斯坦斯·伯曼的《中世纪农业》以来，这些档案还没有得到详细的阐述。我将试图通过问几个相互关联的问题来重新审视伯曼的结论：西斯泰尔人的卡特尔反映了什么人与动物的关系？动物和生态是如何构建人类社区的？世俗牧民和修道院之间的冲突是如何通过动物放牧问题折射出来的？法国牧民生态与中世纪世界其他形式的牧民相比如何？到目前为止，我的研究已经证实，西斯特尔的来源回答了这些问题，为我们对法国南部牧民的知识增添了细致的细节，并与伯曼相比，创造了一幅完全不同的西斯特尔生态图景。例如，蒙塔卢的伊曼纽尔·勒·罗伊·拉杜里曾著名地描述皮埃尔·毛里将他的羊群从阿里耶日放牧到加泰罗尼亚，他“像登山者一样自由”，但阿韦隆山脉西尔维尼亚修道院S修道院附近的牧民将绵羊放牧到距离西尔万埃·S 30公里的卡尔梅尔，而这一小插曲并没有得到应有的研究。我希望挖掘这些细微的细节，如围巾、季节性、饮食文化和运输，以进入非专业牧民以动物为导向的世界。通过将法国南部的畜牧业与一个比较的框架相联系来结束我的研究，我打算向研究其他地区的畜牧业的研究人员展示纠缠的方法的好处，并向专注于国家的历史学家展示中世纪生活在多大程度上由畜牧业模式构成。在学术界之外，我希望鼓励分享有关过去社会错综复杂的生活方式的知识，将引发对当今盛行的以人类为中心的环境态度的进一步质疑。

Inspired by the innovative fields of medieval animal and environmental history, my research aims to enhance our understanding of how medieval animals could be considered agents that, when joined with ecological systems, were constitutive of human society. Using the archives of the forty-three southern French Cistercian monasteries, which offer a rich and untapped repository of multispecies life, I want to ask in what ways animals, ecologies, and pastoralist social systems were intertwined in processes of co-evolution. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on archaeology and anthropology, the central contribution of my research will be describe southern French pastoralism through the lens of 'entanglement', which entails, as Anna Tsing writes, studying 'a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of [...] ways of life'. I thus aim to diversify the often Cathar-dominated Anglophone research agenda of the region, and, through a conclusion which situates French herding practices in a comparative framework of global medieval pastoralism, to add to the bourgeoning historiography of the global middle ages as a time characterised by 'options and experiments' in modes of living.My research builds on scholarship which stresses the entangled nature of past ecologies. While medieval historians typically discuss animals as items in economic systems or as subjects of representation in bestiaries or hagiographies, cutting-edge new research presents animals themselves as agents in social systems. For example, Jamie Kreiner's Legions of Pigs describes pigs as versatile animals which shaped human society, and Robin Fleming's 2022 Ford Lectures portray Roman Britain as an 'anthrozootic' dog-centred world. Following these scholars, my contribution will be to move beyond representation, and to interpret animals as more than just objects of human economies. By studying the entangled nature of medieval French pastoralism, I will show that medieval animals were non-human agents that shaped the contingent human societies with which they were bound. This exciting approach is yet to be applied to the southern French Cistercian archives, which have not received detailed exposition since Constance Berman's 1986 Medieval Agriculture. I will attempt to revisit Berman's conclusions by asking several interrelated questions: what human-animal relations do Cistercian cartularies reflect? How were human communities structured by animals and ecology? How was conflict between lay pastoralists and monasteries refracted through animal herding concerns? And how do French herding ecologies compare to other forms of pastoralism in the medieval world?My research so far has confirmed that the Cistercian sources speak to these questions, add meticulous detail to our knowledge of southern French pastoralism, and, compared to Berman, create a radically different picture of Cistercian ecologies. For example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou famously described Pierre Maury herding his flocks from Ariège to Catalonia with the 'liberty of a mountaineer', but the pastoralists neighbouring the Cistercian monastery of Sylvanès in the Aveyron mountains herded sheep to Calmels, 30km from Sylvanès, and this vignette has not received its deserved study. I hope to excavate these granular details of pannage, seasonality, food cultures and transhumance to reach into the animal-orientated world of lay pastoralists. Concluding my study by relating southern French pastoralism to a comparative framework, I intend to show the benefits of an 'entangled' approach to researchers studying pastoralism in other regions, and, to historians focused on the state, the extent to which medieval life was constituted by patterns of animal husbandry. Outside academia, I hope that encouraging knowledge-sharing about entangled ways of life in past societies will cause further questioning of the anthropocentric attitudes towards the environment prevalent today.