Wasser und Gewässer auf dem Gebiet der Elbslaven (English shop)

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The aim of the present study was to work out, by means of a quantitative historical-semantic analysis, the patterns of perception and interpretation of medieval authors with regard to their natural environment. The focus lay on changes in bodies of water in the course of the transformations of the cultural landscape during the High Medieval Landesausbau (internal colonisation) of the 11th to 13th centuries in East Central Europe.

The study shows that the linguistic changes in the semantic fields of written sources ran parallel to political, ecclesiastical, economic, social, cultural, legal and cultural-landscape processes. Population growth was the basis for the cultivation of hitherto only sparsely settled landscapes and for the growing territorial claim of ecclesiastical and secular territorial lords to rule over these landscapes. This also led to the establishment of an ecclesiastical organisation and to the transfer of technical innovations through the missionary monasteries. These processes are reflected in the written language of the authors of these times: new terms, new collocations and new thematic emphases appear.

Medieval contemporaries differentiated between environmental transformations that were evidently anthropogenic to them and those that appeared to them to be natural. If the transformations could be traced back to human causes, legal consequences could arise and claims could be brought for compensation as well as for the restoration of the former state. By contrast, natural environmental transformations (accumulation and erosion of river banks, destruction of watermills due to flooding and ice drift) could not be blamed on anyone.

How did medieval people perceive their relationship to nature? Although they instrumentalised nature, especially running waters and storms, as acting agents, they did not ascribe to them a will of their own. Through the theocentric pattern of interpretation, they were aware of the ambivalence of a simultaneously friendly and hostile nature as being guided by God. People understood their situation as one of limited dominion over nature. Although a certain scope of action was available to them for their own undertakings, God could end human dominion over nature at any time – for instance through extreme events. It was precisely the apparent autonomous dynamics of these forces that represented the inscrutability of the divine will.