Medieval make do and mend

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Medieval Make Do and Mend" Summary

Release Date: November 14, 2024
Host: Lauren Good
Guest: Annetta Kanell, University of Mannheim
Book Discussed: The Green Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annetta Kanell

---

Introduction

In the "Medieval Make Do and Mend" episode of the History Extra Podcast, host Lauren Good engages in an enlightening conversation with Annetta Kanell, exploring the intricate relationship between medieval societies and sustainability. Drawing insights from Kanell's book, The Green Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, the discussion delves into how medieval practices surrounding waste, recycling, and sustainability offer valuable lessons for today's environmental challenges.

Medieval Attitudes Toward Waste and Sustainability

Lauren Good opens the discourse by highlighting a surprising revelation from Kanell's research: the modern concept of "waste" did not appear in European dictionaries until the 20th century. This absence underscores a fundamental shift in societal attitudes toward consumption and disposal.

Annetta Kanell elaborates, stating, “It's almost impossible to think of society that is so irrational to produce so much waste as we do” (04:35). She contrasts the post-World War II era's surge in mass production and disposable goods with medieval practices, where sustainability was inherently embedded in daily life.

Medieval Recycling and Repair Professions

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the robust repair and recycling industries of the medieval period. Unlike today’s disposable culture, medieval societies thrived on repairing and reusing goods, ensuring longevity and minimizing waste.

Kanell points out, “Making a living with recycling, we are on the way to that, but that's the main thing. And it also means that producing new things must become really expensive again” (04:35). She discusses the prevalence of repairmen in cities like Frankfurt, where professions dedicated to mending shoes, sharpening knives, and repairing household items were not marginal but integral to the economy.

Medieval Secondhand Markets and Economic Tensions

Kanell and Good explore the dynamics of secondhand markets in medieval cities, particularly focusing on Frankfurt. The competition between new goods sellers and repair professionals created a nuanced economic landscape.

Good asks about the restrictions placed on repair and secondhand goods sellers, to which Kanell responds, “There is a constant process of negotiating. It's not like one law and then you decide how things have to be… restrictions, regulations, tax regulations and also price settings” (08:57). This balance ensured that both new and repaired goods coexisted, fostering a sustainable economic environment.

Reuse of Materials in Medieval Construction

The discussion transitions to the architectural practices of the medieval era, specifically the reuse of building materials, known as spolia. This practice involved repurposing materials from ancient ruins to construct new buildings, reflecting both practicality and reverence for historical artifacts.

Kanell illustrates with the throne of Charlemagne in Aachen, “You can clearly see… it's a second or third-hand usage of maybe an antique bathroom or maybe in a saloon” (14:00). This example underscores how recycled materials carried historical significance, enhancing the legitimacy and power of medieval rulers.

Evolution of Paper Making from Recycling

A fascinating segment of the podcast examines the transformation of paper production from medieval times to the present. Originally, paper was made from recycled cloth and natural fibers, facilitating widespread literacy and record-keeping.

Kanell narrates, “It was invented… using and reusing cloth that is no longer in use or cotton or other sort of fibers… until around 1800” (17:41). The shift to wood-based paper in the 18th century marked a significant change, driven by increased demand and regulated access to traditional raw materials. This evolution highlights the enduring importance of sustainable practices in resource management.

Reflections on Medieval Concepts Applied to Modern Sustainability

In the concluding segment, Kanell reflects on how medieval ancestors might perceive today’s sustainability issues. She believes they would admire modern advancements yet caution against neglecting sustainable practices.

Kanell muses, “You have so much, you reached so much… why are you worried now?… use your technology, use your political means… look to the future and trust in your power to change the world” (21:47). Her insights advocate for a balanced approach that leverages modern innovations while embracing the sustainability ethos of the past.

Conclusion

The "Medieval Make Do and Mend" episode offers a compelling exploration of how medieval societies approached sustainability, recycling, and waste management. Annetta Kanell's research sheds light on the sophisticated systems that supported sustainable living long before modern environmental movements. By understanding these historical practices, listeners are encouraged to rethink contemporary strategies for achieving sustainability, emphasizing the timeless value of resourcefulness and community-oriented solutions.

For further exploration, listeners are directed to check out Annetta Kanell's book, The Green Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, and other related episodes featuring historians like Eleanor Barnett.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Annetta Kanell (04:35): “It's almost impossible to think of society that is so irrational to produce so much waste as we do.”
• Annetta Kanell (08:57): “There is a constant process of negotiating… restrictions, regulations, tax regulations and also price settings.”
• Annetta Kanell (14:00): “You can clearly see… it's a second or third-hand usage of maybe an antique bathroom or maybe in a saloon.”
• Annetta Kanell (17:41): “It was invented… using and reusing cloth that is no longer in use or cotton or other sort of fibers… until around 1800.”
• Annetta Kanell (21:47): “Use your technology, use your political means… look to the future and trust in your power to change the world.”

---

Unlock full access to HistoryExtra.com for 6 months for just 99p here.

Transcript

[Walmart Representative]

Want to shop Walmart Black Friday Deals First Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership. Shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart plus see [e-mail] this episode is brought.

[Amazon Representative]

To you by Amazon. The holidays are here and you know what that means. It's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve. Take the stress out of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items from toys to tech and much more. More. Whoever you're gifting for, Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season. Shop Black Friday week starting November 21st.

[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Can you imagine a world where the concept of waste didn't even exist? Well, waste is in fact a much more recent idea than you might expect, as Annetta Canal's book the Green Ages explores. In the medieval period, attitudes to sustainability were very different from today. Lauren Good spoke to Annetta to discover what we can learn from our medieval ancestors when it comes to recycling, from the prevalence of repairmen to how to make paper.

[Lauren Good]

Your book, the Green Medieval Innovations in Sustainability focuses on so many threads of the topic of sustainability, but I want to talk particularly today about the ideas you cover on recycling, consumption and waste. You open the book with quite a big statement that we're running out of solutions because we're using modern strategies to try and solve our challenges when we should instead be looking to the past. Let's start this episode by delving, delving into this a little bit for people who are thinking, oh well, how can we take inspiration from a medieval society that is very different to what we know today? What would you say to them?

[Annetta Kanell]

Well, I just think it's very good to broaden the horizon. We are at risk of losing what is most precious to us, namely this wonderful planet. So I would say looking to the Middle Ages or looking into pre modern societies, looking into non European or non, non Western societies is just a very, very important and actually essential strategy to open our mind for new ideas and new possibilities for the future. It's nothing about imitating the rest of the world or imitating what people did in the olden days. It's rather about restarting our mindset. And the Austrian author Robert Musil, he talked about sin which a sense of possibility which is needed just as well as a sense of the rational. And this sense of possibilities can be broadened by looking into historical societies I.

[Lauren Good]

Think that's such an important distinction. And you make it very well in the book. This idea that we're not looking to imitate history, we're looking to widen our mindsets beyond. Yeah. The modern ideas that we have today. I suppose.

[Annetta Kanell]

Yes, that's exactly the point, really. And you know, I risk the misunderstanding. Nobody wants to go back to the past. And certainly I don't want to go back to the past. I don't want to go back to the Middle Ages of all places. But what I think is people were very intelligent at that time and they found intelligent solutions for big challenges. And so it's maybe a matter of diversity in thinking and finding strategies to solve problems. So history can be a training in solution strategies by broadening our minds.

[Lauren Good]

And we'll talk a little bit about those solutions later on. First of all, I was really surprised actually to read in your book that the modern definition of waste did not appear in European dictionaries until the 20th century. It's almost impossible, isn't it, to imagine a world without the concept of waste?

[Annetta Kanell]

Yes, well, maybe, maybe our ancestors would have said the opposite. It's almost impossible to think of society that is so irrational to produce so much waste as we do. I mean, the One achievement the second half of the 20th century will have reached and maybe will end up in history. History books say in 200 years or 300 years, we managed within only half a century to make a planet of waste. I mean, that's really something which is a very short time development because it's only after World War II that we started to produce very cheap oil, very many unrecyclable goods. And that's the waste we are living with now. And we sort of ignore this fact, but it is a real devastation. So in Germany or in Switzerland, we talk about the, the 1950s syndrome when oil became very, very cheap and when rich people made a lot of money with oil that we started this plastic industry which is now really bothering us and starts, you know, poisoning our drinking waters, our fish, our food and everything. And this is really a short term development. It wasn't like this in the generation when, you know, your grandparents grew up. They lived in an entirely different world where you used a pair of shoes maybe. Yeah, maybe longer than just one season and where you maybe only had one pair of shoes for a year or whatever. If you ask your grandparents, they very often tell stories about how easy or how normal it was to recycle things, to reuse or to repair chompers or whatever. And all that we lost because. Well, because I would say big companies make a lot of money with producing new things and there is not much money in repair. So then looking at medieval societies, take for example the city of Frankfurt, there is a very interesting study which is more than 100 years old, but you can see that repair professions, repair jobs were not just a marginal thing like it is today, but there was really the possibility to make money with repairing things. So this applied not only to close or secondhand markets or building sites, but, but also to hold household goods. And the way you sort of recycled furniture and reworked it and then use it and sell it again. And the people who did it, many of the people who would turn up in the tax registers of the city of Frankfurt, you can see they are well off because poor people didn't pay tax in Frankfurt, only well off people paid tax in many medieval cities. So I think, you know, making a living with recycling, we are on the way to that, but that's the main thing. And it also means that producing new things must become really expensive again.

[Walmart Representative]

Want to shop Walmart Black Friday deals first Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart Plus.

[Lauren Good]

See [e-mail] your coverage of the secondhand market is so fascinating. In the book it really struck me that these markets are a smaller example of what we're seeing today. You provide the example that unsurprisingly a person who made their living from selling people new shoes, for example, wasn't going to be particularly happy about having their profits reduced by a cobbler who makes them last longer. So reduces that need for people to buy new shoes. What restrictions were placed on these people in Frankfurt? Repairing goods or selling second hand goods in response to this tension?

[Annetta Kanell]

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there were tensions, there was competition. If I'm selling new shoes, as you say, I'm not really happy if my neighbor is repairing the old ones. What we see is that there is a constant process of negotiating. It's not like one law and then you decide how things have to be. But it's rather about reworking rules, how they work together. For example, for a second hand tailor, you have restrictions. They are not allowed to sell more than what fits into their shop. So the shop, the size of the shop, has a certain restriction and you're not allowed to have more than what fits into your shop and you're not allowed to have more than maybe two or sometimes three, or sometimes one person who works in your shop as well. So there are restrictions, but they change. And sometimes, you know, there is more demand for repair goods and other times, you see there are more restrictions. And then you have cases from, for example, the building industry. So you have building sites where you. Where cobblers or they have different names where they come and repair. And then the sort of building companies, they would send airmen to hide the instruments, to hide the hammer and the nails and everything for the others. So they wouldn't do the work for cheaper money than the building company would do it. So you see, there is competition, you know, and they are fighting each other. And it's not like an ideal, you know, everything's fine. But you can see in the sources how these conflicts were constantly tried to be balanced out. And yeah, it of course has always to do with restrictions and it has to do with regulations, tax regulations and also price settings.

[Lauren Good]

You talk about the sheer amount of professions there were in repairing items in the medieval era. I really enjoyed the bit when you talked about people actually traveling from home to home and asking if there were things to be repaired. And that was a profession, you know, there was a sheer amount of jobs available, wasn't there, in this sector?

[Annetta Kanell]

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, many of these jobs were sort of not very well looked at, we have to say. But at the same time they were communicators. So if you walked around and made the knives sharp again, you know, that was one of the professions to resharpen the knives or repairing bags or baskets. Laurence Fontaineji is a. She's a colleague of mine in France and she. She reconstructed the lives and works of these people over the ages. And it's just fascinating what a. What a sort of, yeah, important functions they had in communities because only repaired chairs and whatever. They also brought new messages, they brought news. Was a very interesting and, you know, part and parcel of the communal life in these societies. But at the same time, I think one of the big differences is that you have sort of societies that allow you to live a decent life without much money. That's part of another chapter of my book where I'm dealing with social sustainability and the way communities organized access to markets and access to loans for poorer people. And it's not about everybody wanting, you know, from the dishwasher to the millionaire story, but it's rather about being able to live a decent life with a job that gives you a living and lead sort of an accepted, socially accepted existence and family, if you want it, or whatever. So these recycling jobs were very much sort of a mixture. You could become very rich, especially if you resold household goods from rich households. That was a very accepted profession. But it could also be sort of a vagrant person who travels through the whole of Europe by sharpening knives and repairing other tools for agriculture or whatever.

[Lauren Good]

As well as this culture of repairing things and the sector in the medieval period. What other examples did you find particularly striking of our medieval ancestors not wasting anything?

[Annetta Kanell]

Well, of course there is always the very interesting building industry where we can see how material which was around was reused for building houses. For example, in academic terms, we used to talk about spolia, the recycling, especially in the Middle Ages, of ancient building material. So, for example, Roman ruins were used to rebuild many towns and cities in medieval times. And there was a time when historians and art historians looked at this as a process of decay. Spolia means literally, you know, robbed goods. So the idea was in the Middle Ages they weren't able to do things properly, so they reused what they found. But that's gone. I mean, that's passed. Modern architectural or actual recent architectural history and art history is talking about recycling building material. So you have, for example, very famous church buildings, of course, that are using an immense amount of, you know, second hand building material. And it's not like stealing something, but rather it's a professionally organized industry really. So you send Orvieto, for example, is a cathedral in Italy. You send professionals to Rome and then they look for suited material and then they would buy stones and columns and whatever is needed. And then the transport would be regulated and they pay taxes and they organize everything. And it was really a profession, highly professionally organized way to reuse the material that was there. Another very famous example in France and Germany is the throne of Charlemagne in Aachen. That's you can see today, it's sort of built from marble that came probably from near Jerusalem. And you can clearly see, you know, you think, oh, maybe it's a wonderful throne of a medieval ruler. You need, you know, very precious stone or whatever. Well, it seems to be a second or third hand usage of maybe an antique bathroom or maybe even the saloons where people play. Because what we have is actually a grid for playing Mueller. And you have on the side of the throne of Charlemagne, this sort of graffiti, you know. And you can still see it was used in late antiquity as something different, as a very ordinary maybe played on a table in a saloon or maybe in a bathroom. We don't really know. But so that's just very normal and still it added to legitimation and it added to power, of course, for the one who was using it. So it's actually very important to remember that old material and material that has a history can add to your power and also change the standing of what you are, which is actually the same with all the vintage fashion we are having now.

[Lauren Good]

It's such a fascinating comparison, isn't it, how differently we treat building works today. And another element from your book that I really wanted to talk about was the evolution of how we make paper. It's completely different now. Could you just tell listeners how it has changed from when we first started making paper to how are we making now?

[Annetta Kanell]

Well, the interesting thing is I use paper as sort of a recycled product that made world history and really was brought forward a cultural revolution. It was invented, first invented or documented anyway, 2000 years ago in China, in the land of where the Uyghurs live today, the idea of using sort of old cloth, old towels from shipping or whatever, putting it into water and making it sort of like pudding and then, you know, drying it and then having it formed into what we call sheets now. So using and reusing cloth that is no longer in use or cotton or other sort of fibers from wood and then producing a piece of paper out of it that from it. That was really what made world history. And it stayed like that until around 1800. So that's what was the main sort of secret and success of a very powerful invention that has allowed people to write. Many people could write. So in the 18th century, the demand for paper was growing immensely. And you can see that, you know, the use of secondhand clothes and everything was highly regulated. So you have, for example, the father of Wolfgang Mozart Amadeus, Wolfgang Amadeus, the big composer, you know, and you have him writing to the publishers of his son's music. Don't you have enough paper? Can you not please make sure you have the paper? For my son writing and then publishing his music, the same would be true for the other composer, Spa Handel. Or just imagine if Kant would not have been able to write his treatise on philosophy and on the Enlightenment because there was lackage of paper. So we see how the market for secondhand clothes and everything was really highly regulated. You even have smugglers who trade in clothes that are used to produce paper. And only then people start experimenting with alternative material to make paper. And again, you have lots of things we are talking about today. You have straw or hay, you have mushrooms, some sort of very strange ideas about, you know, producing paper and lots of Experiments that were very interesting. Some of them, these people who made the experiments looked at wasps and saw that they made their nests from sort of material they got out of wood. And this brought them to the idea to take wood as a resource or as a raw material to make paper from. And that was actually the beginning of the success story of wood paper, which we are still using today. You can see that alternative raw material had always played a big role.

[Lauren Good]

Annette, we've talked about so many different topics today. You talk about it towards the end of your book, and I thought it would be a good point to end this episode on. If our medieval ancestors were to come here today and see how our society operates and our situation with sustainability, what do you think they would think?

[Annetta Kanell]

I think they would be very astonished and I think they would be maybe a bit jealous because I'm sure they would like our way of life. They would sort of wonder how much we invented. They would maybe also smile when they see how much we are sitting on chairs. They wouldn't like that. I think they might not enjoy the lack of fresh air. Maybe they might be jealous of us as well because they would think, you have so much, you reached so much, you had so much success with your inventions and would, you know, the way you really created the world and made the world? They would think, you know, just why, why are you worried now? There is a challenge, of course, you have a lot of challenges and we see that it's frightening and that you are destroying, risking to destroy your planet. But at the same time, you have so many instruments to do something about it. Use your technology, use your political means, don't go backwards. Why do you fall back to sort of dreams for worlds gone by? Look to the future and trust in your power to change the world, to cooperate and to use common resources in a responsible way, because that's one of the big problems we have now. Humans are able to use common resources responsibly, but we need the framework for doing it. And I think that would be maybe the message they will leave us.

[Podcast Host]

That was Annetta Kanell of the University of Mannheim. You can learn more about this subject in Annetta's book, the Green Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, which is published by Profile. And if you're interested in this subject, then be sure to check out our recent episode with Eleanor Barnett, where she reveals how people in the past tackled food waste, from the Tudor almoner to the rag and bone man. You can find a link in the episode description of this podcast.