The Green Ages: Medieval innovations in sustainability By Annette Kehnel, Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 2024. 352 pages. $45.50 (hardback). ISBN: 9781684582433

According to Annette Kehnel, inequality and climate change challenge today's world; these challenges generate criticisms of capitalism, modernity's dominant paradigm.Today, people attempt to solve these problems by using frameworks developed during the Enlightenment.To Kehnel, there must be different ways of solving today's problems and the source of these solutions is the past.Using European examples from 1000 to 1499, Kehnel alerts us to possibilities from the past capable of providing a sustainable future.The book does not propose concrete solutions, rather, it aims to "awaken our sense of the possibilities out there" (p. 7).Chapter 1 examines the misconception that everyone was poor prior to capitalism.From 1000 to 1300, Europe's population increased, on average, by 0.43% a year until the 1348 Black Death.Europe became urbanized, and while these cities were socially stratified, few relied upon charity.Trade and financial activity expanded, and, dispelling the notion of beleaguered medieval peasants working the fields day in and day out, and craft workers toiling late into the night, Kehnel makes it clear not everyone was poor before capitalism; people probably had less money than we do today, but they had more spare time.Chapter 2 discusses sustainable communal resource management.Discussing Lake Constance's (in Central Europe) fisheries management, Alpine commons' grazing, and Pyrenees' transhumance, Kehnel challenges the idea that establishing modern property rights (a central step in transition from feudalism to capitalism) was a necessary step in preventing the tragedy of the commons, one of neoliberalism's most sacrosanct principles.Addressing Garrett Hardin's 1968 article "The tragedy of the commons," Kehnel wrote, "Scholars unanimously agree, from a historical perspective, Hardin's thesis is untenable" (p.73).Hardin (1968), in Kehnel's view, inaccurately assumed all commons were freely accessible to everyone and that people only focused on what they could extract without cooperating.In the past, those involved in managing common property resources were concerned with sustaining their livelihood sources and they used them using a long-term view.Chapter 3 examines recycling.People who repaired things filled Medieval cities and used goods formed a major part of the marketplace.People recycled paper, made of clothing scraps, and made buildings from antiquity's debris."Repurposing, and reusing, recyclable materials," writes Kehnel, "was the gold standard" (p.143).Chapter 4 discusses microfinance, widespread in medieval Europe long before becoming the basis for Muhammad Yunus's 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.In the Middle Ages, people considered microfinance, funded by donations from the wealthy, a "basic component of socially and economically sustainable behavior" (p.164).In 15 th -century Italy, the Monti di Pietà funded charity and provided loans to the poor.Medieval microfinance was so well-established that Kehnel asks, "Did capitalism in fact lead to the exclusion of a large part of the population from local financial markets" (p.175)?The Middle Ages also had extensive amounts of peer-to-peer lending."Medieval societies," wrote Kehnel, "were eager to enable, and safeguard, market participation for all" (p.198).Chapter 5 explores medieval European minimalism.Modernity has many people questioning our addiction to continuous economic growth (Ellwood, 2014).Kehnel points out that "minimalism is ancient news" (p.199).Kehnel discusses the medieval mendicant religious orders, specifically the Franciscans.St Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) lived a life of poverty dedicated to nature and other humans.By 1300, there were 1,500 European Franciscan communities and many other minimalist movements.These groups turned towards the losers in the game of progress, those urban society had marginalized.These mendicants had their fingers on their time's pulse, understood people's problems, and recognized the challenges economic growth brought with it.These minimalist groups were also the source of the environmental movement's historical roots, and they redefined the relationship between humans and nature.

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