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的创新领域的启发，我的研究旨在提高我们对中世纪动物如何被视为代理人的理解，当与生态系统结合时，是人类社会的组成部分。法国南部的43座西多会修道院提供了丰富而尚未开发的多物种生命宝库，我想利用这些修道院的档案来探讨动物、生态和游牧社会系统在共同进化过程中是如何交织在一起的。采取跨学科的方法，借鉴考古学和人类学，我的研究的核心贡献将是通过“纠缠”的透镜描述法国南部的畜牧业，这需要，如安娜青写道，研究“开放式集合的马赛克[.]生活方式”。因此，我的目标是多样化的经常卡特里主导的英语研究议程的区域，并通过一个结论，位于法国放牧的做法在全球中世纪畜牧业的比较框架，添加到新兴的历史编纂的全球中世纪作为一个时代的特点是“选项和实验”的生活modes.My研究建立在奖学金，强调过去的生态纠缠的性质。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动物寓言或圣徒传记中的代表主题进行讨论，但前沿的新研究将动物本身视为社会体系中的代理人。例如，杰米·克赖纳（Jamie Kreiner）的《猪军团》（Legions of Pigs）将猪描述为塑造人类社会的多功能动物，罗宾·弗莱明（Robin Fleming）的《2022年福特讲座》（2022年）将罗马不列颠描绘为一个以狗为中心的“人类动物”世界。在这些学者之后，我的贡献将超越表象，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畜牧业的纠结性质，我将表明，中世纪的动物是非人类的代理人，塑造了他们所绑定的偶然的人类社会。这种令人兴奋的方法尚未应用于法国南部的西多会档案，自康斯坦斯·伯曼（Constance Berman）1986年的《中世纪农业》（Medieval Agriculture）以来，这些档案还没有得到详细的阐述。我将试图重新审视伯曼的结论，提出几个相互关联的问题：什么样的人与动物的关系做西多会cartularies反映？动物和生态是如何构建人类社区的？牧民和寺院之间的冲突如何通过动物放牧问题折射出来？法国的放牧生态与中世纪世界的其他形式的畜牧业相比如何？到目前为止，我的研究已经证实，西多会的来源谈到了这些问题，为我们对法国南部畜牧业的了解增加了细致的细节，并且，与伯曼相比，创造了一个完全不同的西多会生态。例如，Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie在Montaillou着名地描述了Pierre Maury以“登山者的自由”从Ariège到Catalonia放牧羊群，但邻近阿韦龙山脉Sylvanès的Cistercian修道院的牧民将羊群放牧到距离Sylvanès 30公里的Calmels，而这个小插曲没有得到应有的研究。我希望挖掘这些颗粒细节的畜群，季节性，饮食文化和游牧达到动物为导向的世界，奠定牧民。结束我的研究有关法国南部的畜牧业的比较框架，我打算显示的好处，一个“纠缠”的方法研究畜牧业在其他地区的研究人员，并专注于国家的历史学家，在何种程度上中世纪的生活是由畜牧业的模式。在学术界之外，我希望鼓励对过去社会中纠缠在一起的生活方式进行知识共享，这将进一步质疑当今普遍存在的以环境为中心的态度。

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.