The Department of History at Ghent University is looking for three PhD students (four years) to do interdisciplinary research on biodiversity in Northern Europe during the Late Middle Ages (15-16th centuries) as part of the ERC research team ECOLENT. The ERC-funded project Ecological Entanglements and Biodiversity in Late Medieval Northern Europe, 1400-1600 (ECOLENT) develops a new conceptual-methodological framework to study biodiversity in a historical context. It will do so by using the late medieval Hanseatic League as a case study. This merchant association bought food products and raw materials in Scandinavia and the Baltic, and exchanged them for manufactured goods in the urbanised Low Countries and England. In this way, they created both economic and ecological connections between different regions of Northern Europe. The main focus of the project is not human activities as such, but rather how biotic communities responded to anthropogenic pressures. More specifically, the project studies the impact of the socio-economic pressures generated by the Hanseatic trade network on animal and plant diversity in six regions (the county of Flanders, the duchy of Guelders, the duchy of Schleswig, the duchies of Brunswick-Lüneburg, East Prussia, and Kraków Voivodeship) from 1400 to 1600 by using both historical and archaeological sources. The project engages with current debates in ecological conservation, such as the use of historical baselines to set conservation goals and the importance of human activities to maintain biodiversity. It also considers ecological questions about adaptation and fundamental versus realized niches.
Plus d’informations :
[Website Ghent University]