ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘May God protect me on my way… and no cloud or bad weather poison me’: Religion, Bodies and the Minescape in Northern European Mines (c.1600-1700)

• In Event: Minescapes 1: What is a “Minescape”?

English Abstract

When, in 1617, the Upper Harz mine manager Georg Engelhard von Lohneysen produced his Report on Mining, he included a prayer to be spoken by miners before entering the shaft. The prayer asked “that God will protect me on my way… [and] that no cloud or bad weather can poison me.” The mention of bad vapours is particularly salient, as the prayer follows Lohneysen’s extensive discussion of the dangers facing miners. Lohneysen is clear: amongst the most pressing dangers facing miners was the “evil air: of the mines, which “poisoned [miners] to such an extent that they lose all movement and sensibility, sense and reason, and are thus, without pain, soon dead.”
By 1600, colonial encounters with non-European bodies and environments prompted European medical theorists to reconsider what constituted a healthy body and the interconnected relationship between body and place. As mining technologies, mineral knowledge, and miners themselves were transferred across ever-greater distances, people and practices adjusted to diverse landscapes, encountering huge bio- and geo-diversity. When ideas about bodily health were deeply unstable, mining administrators – whose profits relied on the physical wellbeing of their workers – were concerned with the relationship between body and environment. This paper explores how the concept of the “Minescapes” develops our understanding of the relationship between environment, body, and place in the mining communities of early modern Europe. It investigates the concept of mines as a liminal space: bridging the gap between micro/macro, above/below, the mine shaft offered access to hidden knowledge and materials. In exploring this relationship, I draw attention to how questions about productive environments and resource management go to the core of society’s relationship between the corporeal body and the natural world.

Author

• Amelia Hutchinson, German Mining Museum Bochum