Lucifer's Land
The Mines and Miners of Europe, 1180–1550
$190.38
- Hardcover
320 pages
- Release Date
8 December 2026
Summary
A social, cultural, and environmental history of Europe’s preindustrial mines and miners
In the late twelfth century CE, Europe began to experience its first, centuries-long mining boom. From the Carpathians to Cornwall, and from Sweden to Sardinia, tens of thousands of laborers bore into the subsoil to quench the region’s newfound thirst for metals and minerals. While the strategic and economic value of the era’s extraction has garnered much attention, mines themselv…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781512829990 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1512829994 |
| Author: | G. Geltner |
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Imprint: | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 320 |
| Release Date: | 8 December 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
| Series: | The Middle Ages Series |
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Critics Review
“Lucifer’s Land offers premodern environmental historians important insight into how a specialized economic activity deeply affected landscapes, waterscapes, and the inhabitants of ecosystems, close and not-so-close to the sites where people extracted and processed metalliferous material. Geltner skillfully argues for the enduring environmental relevance of medieval and later ‘preindustrial’ mining activity, and for the development from the twelfth century of a genuine environmental awareness in mining communities.”– “Paolo Squatriti, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor”
“Lucifer’s Land provides a welcome social and cultural history of mines and miners during the great expansion of mining across Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Geltner’s original focus is on the social and material forces that made miners distinctive within the rural landscapes they inhabited. Based on extensive textual and archaeological evidence, Lucifer’s Land offers new perspectives on the legal context, the social and environmental impact of mining, on miners’ health and public health concerns, and on perceptions of risk and precarity of the underground world.”– “Pamela Smith, Columbia University”
G. Geltner
G. Geltner is Professor of History at Monash University.
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