Authors: Ellen Wurtzel; Emily Hutchison

French history has had a long love affair with the environment, one that stretches back to the Annales School, most notably with medieval and early modern historians Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Fernand Braudel.1 The Annalistes were, as we know, firm proponents of longue-durée thinking, but they were also the first in the European historical tradition to emphasize the importance of integrating the land as an historical agent worthy of attention, and the critical role that climate and its fluctuations played in historical phenomenology. It is not lost on the editors and contributors of this special forum on medieval French environments that the forerunners of French environmental history were predominantly pre-modernists, and that, since the surge in environmental history in the early 2000s, scholars of French history across temporal divides have repeatedly acknowledged their fundamental contribution to environmental history writ large, and French environmental history in particular.

Published on French Historical Studies (2026) 49 (3): 375–389.

https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-12436542

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