A Sunken City and A Human Age
The recent viral story about the discovery of a sunken medieval city is an opportunity to tell a better story
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Scholars are discovering things about the Middle Ages all the time but rarely does a story about these discoveries go viral, so when it does it’s always worth thinking about why that story caught on with the media.
Two recent examples - both of these stories started small and local, but then caught and traveled:
A man found a copy of a medieval manuscript at an estate sale in Maine
Carpenters are using medieval tools to rebuild Notre Dame’s roof
The first is an example of “cool medieval thing discovered.” The second is “quasi-medieval thing happening now.”
Not pictured here, but a third type of viral story about the Middle Ages (anecdotally - but it would make a great systematic media studies project) seems to be “science reveals something about the medieval past.” When done badly, this third category seems to place science as the arbiter of truth, proving something that humanists likely already knew. But when done well (see, for example, Monica Green’s work), the science enlivens the discovery made by the Humanities and together they enrich our understanding of the past, open new avenues for inquiry with diverse methodology.
But this week, the viral medieval story has been about the town of Rungholt in Frisia (now in modern Denmark). The town was built on mud flats and bogs, and is an example of the way medieval people worked with their environment to shape it. It’s also a story of limitations.
A great storm surge in 1362 destroyed the town, killing thousands. Humanists have studied the records of Rungholt and have known about its life and demise for a long time, and now scientists are using magnetic mapping to identify the contours of the lost medieval city in the Wadden Sea.
In a press release (surely more advanced publications will come), the team says,
“The finds in the area investigated, which covers more than ten square kilometers, include 54 terps, systematic drainage systems, a sea dike with a tidal gate harbor as well as two sites of smaller churches – and now also a large main church. The settlement area found must therefore be regarded as one of the historically reported main sites of the medieval administrative district of Edomsharde.”
So what does that mean? It means this was an advanced complicated city carved out of initially uninhabitable land and then transformed into a bustling port in the north of Europe. An Islamic vase taken from the site helps demonstrate the permeability of medieval Europe, its connectedness to the wider world even across the Mediterranean. But Rungholt’s demise also demonstrates the vulnerability of community in trying to transform your environment.
Viral stories are opportunities to use the brief capture of media attention on this history to do the important work we talked about in our last post of making the vitality of medieval studies visible.
So when David was contacted for an outside comment by the CBC (they also have a great interview with the principal investigator), he wrote:
“This work continues to help redefine our understanding of medieval Europe, including this city on a northerly coast, as a connected, permeable, complex world with connections that stretch across continents and seas. Rungholt and its fate is a human story, and I hope we can always see medieval people as different than us in many ways, but still humans, our fellows, with all the potential for joy and tragedy that the human condition brings.”
The medieval world, just like our own, was one of full, living colors. And there’s much still to explore and to discover. Next week, probably, some other medieval thing will go viral. And those of us who want to tell a fuller, more true story about the medieval past need to be ready.
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