Educational Lecture About Bees in The Middle Ages
Historical buffs and those who love to dig deep into the past, will be happy to know there is an upcoming lecture that will probably please you enormously. All who wish to attend are welcome.
It is about bees in the medieval world, wax, honey, and cross-cultural trade in the later Middle Ages. This opportunity comes to us all, worldwide, from the Utrect Centre for Medieval Studies (UCMS) at Utrect University in The Netherlands.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 13, 2022, from 15:15 to 17:00 (3:15 to 5:00). If you would like to sign up to attend this online lecture, you can do so here.
In this unrelated 6:36-minute video by Kobean History, we get a sampling of beekeeping in the Middle Ages:
This is the second lecture in the UCMS Lecture Series. It will be presented by Alex Sapoznik, of Kings College London, and will address such topics as bees, honey, wax trading, beekeeping and more in the medieval world.
There is no doubt that bees were a hot topic in some parts of the Medieval world. Beekeeping was done on a massive scale in the central and western Maghreb region in the later Middle Ages.
In those times, enormous quantities of wax were considered necessary for Christian religious devotion. The Maghreb was the main production zone in the northern Mediterranean, which supplied this need. Very little of this wax was imported into Christian Europe, although the quantity of wax shipped from this area indicates that honey production was performed on an extraordinary scale.
A mutually rewarding lucrative and far-reaching trade flourished during this time. Consideration of the divergent routes of honey and wax offers insights into how the bee in both Christianity and Islam demonstrated the interconnection of environment, economy, and culture in the pre-modern world.
Alex Sapoznik is a Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History at Kings College, London. Her work concerns the intersection where culture, economy, society, and the environment met in the late medieval period.
To attend the lecture you can go to this page to find out more and sign up. Please note, we do not know anything more than what is posted in this blog post, so if you have any questions, please contact the university platform.
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