He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries, and reported the following:
Interesting proposition, this Page 99 Test. I wondered how something meant to assess the readability of fiction might turn out for an academic’s big environmental history of a period, place, and sector in the premodern past. To my mild surprise this turns out OK, at least from the author’s perspective. Assuming the proof copy from December 2022 is replicated in the actual book (which I have yet to see), page 99 is quite representative of my approach.Learn more about The Catch at the Cambridge University Press website.
Page 99 of The Catch is part of chapter 3 on subsistence fishing, the local fishing for a consuming household that prevailed across medieval Europe and especially in the period before about 1100 CE. This sample treats ‘direct subsistence’, the work done by ordinary people to feed their own household, not that for a superior or lord. In this sector I emphasize how capture methods were shaped by and transmitted local traditional ecological knowledge in peasant societies throughout medieval western Christendom, whether they exploited marine or freshwater aquatic systems. The page further displays something of the diversity and geographic spread of evidence on which the book rests as well as the different kinds of source materials which underlie my assertions about a distant, obscure, and little understood past.
Fishing is simultaneously an economic and ecological activity, a zone of interaction between a natural world with its own characteristics and dynamisms and a realm of human cultures with their own prerogatives and powers. This interaction is the domain of environmental history. The Catch engages the interplay of the natural and the cultural at the scale of the European subcontinent and cultural community of medieval Latin Christendom, so is meant for readers interested in environmental history and in medieval studies. As an environmental history it gives equal status and autonomy to the cultural evolution and drivers of human practices and the non-cultural forces of nature, which come together in human societies and their biophysical structures. Sometimes forces rooted in planetary physics, chemistry, and biology propelled and shaped the interaction; in other circumstances learned human prerequisites were the primary drivers. Neither is without effect on the other.
By around the turn of the millennium Europe’s rising market exchange sector included local artisanal fishing, the capture and sale of local fishes to local consumers, mostly in emergent urban centres. Over time and at local scale responses to increasing demand for fish resulted in perceptions of shortage, rising prices, assertion of property rights in fisheries, and governmental efforts to regulate them ‘for the public good.’ Both common rights and private lordship could succeed or fail at preserving fish stocks. More interventionist were later medieval creation of distinctive means for artificial culture of freshwater fishes and long-distance exploitation of hitherto unimpacted wild stocks on and beyond Europe’s marine frontiers. These innovations set templates for both greater future supplies and overexploitation. Yet under both the benign medieval climate anomaly and the difficulties of the subsequent little ice age local and regional communities found adaptations to new environmental conditions. Everyday lives of ordinary medieval people, -- eaters, traders, and catchers of fish -- played out in complex interchange with aquatic habitats and biodiversity. The millennium of medieval human perceptions and responses to these changes bears upon even present-day understandings of aquatic ecologies and their management.
--Marshal Zeringue
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