Medieval Resiliences (?) A Historical Anthropology of Environmental Risks" symposium

Environmental history as it has unfolded over the past 15 years has necessarily taken up and transposed concepts from twentiethcentury ecology, which initially fed disciplinary approaches sometimes far removed from history. Irrigated by the environmental history of the American school, the historical sciences, especially contemporary, have questioned the environmental object through the prism of notions of crisis and transition (notably energy). More recently, medievalists have taken up the issue, as shown by the SHMESP congress in 2023, the Leeds congress in July 2024 on the theme of "Crisis", and forthcoming scientific meetings on risks and transitions in the exploitation of natural resources. In the face of climatic hazards, disasters, and resource depletion, the idea of resilience has increasingly appeared in the discourse of historians in studies on the reaction of past societies to environmental evolutions.

The notion of resilience comes from mechanics, referring to the resistance of materials to shocks. Since the mid-20th century, Anglo-Saxons have been applying it'to the human sciences, and only since the early 2000s in French-speaking circles. The English term used in SHS, "the fact of bouncing back", is borrowed from zoology in the sense of the reproductive capacity of an animal species unused because of a hostile environment, but susceptible to sudden expansion, if that environment improves (Husson 1970). It was then psychology that took hold of the concept (ability to persist and rebuild) in major post-traumatic situations (natural or industrial disasters, attacks...).

While ecological resilience evokes the ability of an ecosystem to return to its original equilibrium after a disturbance, the notion taken into account by the governance of today's societies implies more the idea of resignation in the face of an unprecedented and irreversible situation. Recently, anthropologists have reminded us that disasters, even when triggered by natural phenomena, are above all social and political events. The ethnographic view sheds light on aspects that are often invisible to the media gaze, revealing the complexity of disasters as profoundly social events, along with forms of adaptation both individual and collective that distance societies from the simple idea of resignation.

What then of medieval societies?