Project description
Tracing biodiversity through the Hanseatic trade
Trade in late medieval Northern Europe moved more than goods. It shaped entire ecosystems. With this in mind, the ERC-funded ECOLENT project aims to explore how the Hanseatic League’s trade of food and raw materials across Scandinavia, the Baltic, the Low Countries, and England changed plant and animal life from 1400 to 1600. Researchers will consider how economic activity shaped biodiversity in six areas: Brunswick-Lüneburg, East Prussia, and Flanders, Guelders, Kraków and Schleswig. The project will show that animals and plants actively responded to human pressures. It will also provide information about past biodiversity that is useful for dealing with current ecological problems.
Objective
ECOLENT develops a new conceptual-methodological framework to study the impact of ecological entanglements, interconnections between different regions, on biodiversity in a historical context. It will do so by using the late medieval Hanseatic League as a case study. This merchant association bought food products and raw materials in Scandinavia and the Baltic, and exchanged them for manufactured goods in the urbanised Low Countries and England. In this way, they created both economic and ecological connections between different regions of Northern Europe. Humans' modification of ecosystems in one part of the trade network can only be understood by considering it in tandem with interventions in the network's other regions.
The project studies the impact of the socio-economic pressures the Hanseatic trade network generated on animal and plant diversity in six regions (Flanders, Guelders, Schleswig, Brunswick-Lüneburg, East Prussia, and Kraków) from 1400 to 1600. It thus draws attention to the history of biodiversity, a subject that has been overlooked in both historical and archaeological studies so far, but whose study has become particularly urgent in the context of current ecological challenges. The methodology developed on the basis of the Hanseatic League's exceptionally rich source material — historical and archaeological — can later be adapted to examine biodiversity in other geographical and chronological contexts.
Many scholars have analysed humans' relationship with nature, but none have placed relationships within animal and plant communities at the centre of attention. The main focus has always been on their use as trade commodities. The project proposes a new interpretation of non-human agency that acknowledges both animals' and plants' capacity to respond to environmental stimuli. They did not remain passive towards human attempts to commodify the natural world, even though only few of them were truly agents in their own right. This is their story.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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9000 Gent
Belgium
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