Recording of Hanse Gold: London and the International Trade in Beeswax in Medieval Europe – Zoom Talk on 9th October
Recording of ‘Hanse Gold: London and the International Trade in Beeswax in Medieval Europe’ – Zoom Talk held on the 9th October 2023.
Below are some further recommended articles that Mark Whelan has sent through for members interested.
I attach a brilliant article about the wax trade in England written by Alex, my former boss and project leader, published a couple of years ago. I also attach my little piece on the importance of bees and beekeeping in Bohemia, in case that might be of interest.
On the project website, there are lots of mini blog posts about wax, honey, candles, and all manner of bee-related matters, that might interest your members:
https://beesinthemedieval.wordpress.com/blog-2/
I paste here a few links to some of the research that we published as a project, in case you or your fellow chandlers fancy reading some more substantial fare:
An article where I try to make sense of ‘Polish’ wax and its gifting in urban and diplomatic contexts:
An article where I try to make sense of the prestige attached to mead in the Baltic (mead was exported all the way from Riga to London in the 1400s, such was the demand for Baltic mead):
https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/40/4/470/6500175?searchresult=1
A jointly authored article on beekeeping and its cultural and ecological contexts with a pan-European focus:
https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/118225/6/Historia-Medieval_22_11.pdf
An article on the honey trade with a European focus too:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03044181.2023.2188603
Since the ‘Bees in Medieval Europe’ project finished in 2022, Alex has gone onto get more funding to look at honey and other environmentally sensitive commodities in Europe more generally. If you ever wanted to talk to her or invite her to give a talk, I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you. Her website and contact details are here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/ecomeds
Mark Whelan
Speaker: Mark Whelan completed his PhD in medieval history in 2014 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and subsequently held teaching and research posts at the University of Manchester, the Prussian Cultural Foundation, and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Between 2018-2021 he worked at Kings College London as the German Language and Archives specialist on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Bees in the Medieval World: Economic, Environmental and Cultural Perspectives’, led by Alexandra Sapoznik.
