Lucifer's Land by G. Geltner - ISBN: 9781512829990
Hardcover
Digging deep: Europe’s miners shaped land, law, and legend.
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Lucifer's Land

The Mines and Miners of Europe, 1180–1550

RRP$159.99

$135.99

  • Hardcover

    320 pages

  • Release Date

    8 December 2026

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Summary

A social, cultural, and environmental history of Europe’s preindustrial mines and miners

In the late twelfth century CE, Europe began to experience its first, centuries-long mining boom. From the Carpathians to Cornwall, and from Sweden to Sardinia, tens of thousands of laborers bore into the subsoil to quench the region’s newfound thirst for metals and minerals. While the strategic and economic value of the era’s extraction has garnered much attention, mines themselv…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781512829990
ISBN-10:1512829994
Author:G. Geltner
Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
Imprint:University of Pennsylvania Press
Format:Hardcover
Number of Pages:320
Release Date:8 December 2026
Dimensions:152mm x 229mm
Series:The Middle Ages Series
A-Format
B-Format
Lucifer's Land by G. Geltner - ISBN: 9781512829990
152 × 229 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Lucifer’s Land offers premodern environmental historians important insight into how a specialized economic activity deeply affected landscapes, waterscapes, and the inhabitants of ecosystems, close and not-so-close to the sites where people extracted and processed metalliferous material. Geltner skillfully argues for the enduring environmental relevance of medieval and later ‘preindustrial’ mining activity, and for the development from the twelfth century of a genuine environmental awareness in mining communities.”– “Paolo Squatriti, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor”
Lucifer’s Land provides a welcome social and cultural history of mines and miners during the great expansion of mining across Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Geltner’s original focus is on the social and material forces that made miners distinctive within the rural landscapes they inhabited. Based on extensive textual and archaeological evidence, Lucifer’s Land offers new perspectives on the legal context, the social and environmental impact of mining, on miners’ health and public health concerns, and on perceptions of risk and precarity of the underground world.”– “Pamela Smith, Columbia University”

About The Author

G. Geltner

G. Geltner is Professor of History at Monash University.

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