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

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.