Projects

RSE network grant

The Centre received an Arts & Humanities Research Network Grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the period 2021-2023 to fund two of its aims.

The first is to facilitate productive interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of literature, history, archaeology, and the sciences working on the environments of the ancient Mediterranean through a series of workshops and conferences. This has involved building a network of international collaborators from a range of disciplines across the environmental humanities and sciences and the ongoing organisation of a series of online and in-person events.

The second aim is to adapt academic research on the environmental history of the ancient world for secondary school curricula. Andrea Brock and Ruben Post have produced paired school programmes on the environmental histories of ancient Rome and Greece, respectively that are being adapted for dissemination through an online platform devoted to the publication of environmental educational materials.

Building the Eternal City: the challenge and allure of Rome’s riverine landscape

From 2019-2022, Andrea Brock was supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for her project ‘Building the Eternal City: the challenge and allure of Rome’s riverine landscape.’ This project employs a combination of environmental, archaeological, and literary evidence to reveal new details on Rome’s origins by investigating the city’s early relationship with the Tiber River.

Geoarchaeological investigations in Rome’s central river valley have shown that the landscape offered numerous advantageous for the fledgling settlement, including a natural harbor and ford. As the city grew, however, the riverine landscape changed dramatically. From the sixth century BCE onwards, the ancient Romans adapted to increasing threats of floods and sedimentation in their valleys. Ultimately, this project aims to demonstrate how environmental pressures in Rome’s early history served as important community and state-building forces.

Key publications from this project include an open access article in the 2021 issue of the Journal of Roman Studies, entitled “On the Banks of the Tiber: Opportunity and Transformation in Early Rome”. This project is also featured in an online Sustainability Case Study, “Urbanizing the Eternal City: How did the ancient Romans transform and adapt to Rome’s riverine landscape?”

Climate, Decision-making, and Resilience in the First Millennium BCE Greek World

Ruben Post received a postdoctoral research fellowship from the A.G. Leventis Foundation from 2020-2022 for his ongoing project, ‘Climate, Decision-making, and Resilience in the First Millennium BCE Greek World.’

This interdisciplinary project, whose primary output will be a monograph, reconstructs the links between climate, economic decision-making, and resilience in the first millennium BCE Aegean, situating ancient Greek societies within broader discussions of the ecological resilience of pre-modern civilisations.

The first part of this analysis examines evidence for climate change in the ancient Aegean and its possible effects on the cultivation of grain, grapevines, and olives, the staple crops of ancient Greece. Working from that foundation, it then in the second part to explore how social, economic, cultural, and political institutions shaped perceptions of and responses to extreme weather, and thus modulated the impacts of climatic fluctuations on ancient Greek societies

The first article on this topic, “Warfare, Weather, and the Politics of Grain Shortage in the Early 2nd c. BC Achaian League,” appeared in Historia in 2022. A second, “Parapegmata and Poleis: Astrometeorological Calendars and Their Use in the Hellenistic City-State,” will be published in 2023.

Mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception

‘Mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception’ is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, from 2017-2023. It is run jointly by Jason König and Dawn Hollis.

The project aims among other things to shed new light on the sophistication of ancient responses to mountains in both literature and lived experience. That has involved extensive engagement with recent developments in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Jason König’s book The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture, was published by Princeton University Press in 2022.

Dawn Hollis’s work has pursued similar goals for responses to mountain in early modern culture. One of her goals, and one of the goals of the project more broadly, is to challenge the standard narrative of mountain history which assumes a widespread lack of interest in mountains before the eighteenth century.

We also aim to understand more clearly the continuing influence of premodern ways of thinking about mountains, and landscape and environment more generally, within modern mountain writing.

That strand of the project has involved developing networks of scholars working on mountains across a wide range of disciplines. We ask what role the humanities does, can, and should play in the wider field of mountain studies and in the ongoing understanding of the human relationship to the natural world.

Our edited volume on that theme Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

For more information see the project website.

Women and the Baths in Ancient Medicine

From 2022-23, Giacomo Savani received a Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Early Career Fellowship for his project ‘Women and the Baths in Ancient Medicine’. This project explores the role of balneology in ancient gynaecological texts and their influence on Renaissance treatises.

Modern scholarship has yet to fully recognise the importance that ancient physicians attributed to bathing in treating female patients, and the reception of these ideas in the Renaissance is almost entirely unstudied. The project engages with ancient and early modern medical texts combining the traditional philological tools of close reading with gender theory and sensory studies.

The primary outputs of the project will be two articles. The first article (in preparation) reassesses the evidence for gender-specific medical knowledge in Greco-Roman medical literature concerning baths and bathing, focusing on Soranus of Ephesus’ Gynaecology, Galen’s Hygiene, and Caelius Aurelianus’ On Acute Diseases and On Chronic Diseases. The second article (in preparation) looks at the reception of ancient texts in Renaissance balneological treatises, focusing on Giorgio Franciotti’s De Balneo Villensi (1552) and Giulio Iasolino’s De rimedi naturali che sono nell’isola di Pithecusa (1588).

Ancient Environmental Studies in the Undergraduate Curriculum

CAES research is being actively incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum in the School of Classics at St Andrews. In a module on Applied Classics in the Modern World, Alice König, Andrea Brock, and Ruben Post have sought to demonstrate the value of historical perspectives on human-environment interactions. Students are encouraged to consider ways that History can be applied to find solutions for modern ecological crises. These efforts were recognized by the University’s 2021 prize for Sustainability in the Curriculum.