The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia

by Abigail Agresta

Overview

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived? In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period.

Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501764172
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2022
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Abigail Agresta is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Works and Arts of Men: Irrigation and Environment
2. Waters Dedicated to Some Purposes: New Infrastructure
3. For the Beautification of the City: Christian Urban Reform
4. Divine Mercy and Help: Natural Disaster and the Rise of Rogation Processions
5. Seeking the Dew of His Grace: Droughts
6. From Purification to Protection: Plague
7. That for Which the King of Kings Sent the Flood? Floods and Locusts
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Dana Wessell Lightfoot

The Keys to Bread and Wine provides a crucially important examination of how a growing urban center navigated its environmental challenges—physical, climatic, and religious—in the late medieval period, integrating the Iberian peninsula into the developing environmental history of the Middle Ages.

Ellen F. Arnold

The Keys to Bread and Wine unlocks the potential of close case studies to reveal the complexity of medieval responses to environmental threats and opportunities. Combining the best aspects of medieval urban, environmental, and water history, Abigail Agresta shows how medieval actors—the city council of Valencia—could use both pragmatic and ritual responses to environmental challenges and how those responses were shaped by local socioecological conditions.

Maya Soifer Irish

It is a rare work of scholarship that can simultaneously make a fresh contribution to the administrative, environmental, and religious history of late medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. Tracing the efforts of the municipal government of Valencia to manage natural disasters, Abigail Agresta documents the process through which the council systematically reshaped the urban landscape, striving to eliminate its Andalusi Muslim and Jewish legacies, and implement a vision of a society that was demonstrably Christian.