Repast: Scientific and Historical Approaches to Food, Ecology, and Environment

Overview: 

This project, through a day-long workshop brings together bioscientists and historians to integrate data from the past into the way we grow, harvest, and eat food in the present. The project is organised around six “food strands,” each comprised of an edible plant or animal – flax, mushrooms, maize, deer, fish, and birds – that were and are significant in Britain, culturally and biologically, past and present. Workshop participants will work together to analyse packets of historic data pulled from rare books and manuscripts written in Britain and its empire c. 1400-1800 and to match them with artefacts or living collections or populations where possible. Breaking into small, mixed-discipline study teams, the scholars will assess the packets of data for historical value, including evidence of religious change, the growth of empire, the rise in print, and the histories of medicine and science; they will simultaneously search them for scientific value such as biodiversity, sustainable growing practices, population management, and global exchange. The workshop will allow participants to join together to assess how this type of scientific and historical collaboration and information-sharing might scale up into future projects that add valuable heritage context to landscape conservation, restoration, and sustainable farming.

Objectives:

This project will involve cross-discipline colleagues at the first stage of research around six significant edible plants and animals in Britain: flax, mushrooms, maize, deer, fish, and birds.

The key objectives are to sponsor a day of study, exchange of ideas, and grant applications planning.
Participants will analyse historic data sourced from museums, libraries, and archives. There will a focus on Britain and its globally significant empire, c. 1500-1800. Mixed-discipline breakout teams will assess intersections between historical aspects, including religious change, growth of empire, rise in print, histories of medicine and science, and biological aspects, such as biodiversity, sustainable growing practices, population management, and regional exchanges. Participants will share findings to scale up into future interdisciplinary research.

Activities and Events:

A day-long workshop will unite bioscientists and historians to integrate historical and scientific study of edible plants and animals, to better understand the past, present, and future of human sustenance. Although historians and bioscientists often seek and use the same data – descriptions of biodiversity across place and time, its management and challenges – they rarely collaborate at initial data collection and evaluation. If historians and bioscientists collaborate at all, it is by reading each other’s published work.