History of Medieval Life and the Sciences

The history of daily life and material culture of the Middle Ages is a field of the historical disciplines that has to deal with a variety of sources and approaches. This fact has led to the need for a large amount of interdisciplinary contact and communication. Concerning cooperation with the natural sciences, however, it is still possible to encounter the common misconception that science can say nothing about history because history cannot be experimented with. This is just wrong. In a science that seeks to explore historical issues, the historical record that is read from the present state of nature is interpreted in the context of underlying mechanisms that have been explored in the laboratory. It is apparent that such a collaboration between representatives of the field of the history of medieval life and scientists has been effected in a number of individual projects; what is still lacking, however, is a general interdisciplinary dialogue and co-operation. This was the reason for the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to organise an international round table discussion in 1998. The book contains the proceedings of this meeting. They firstly discuss general problems of the dialogue between representatives of the history of medieval daily life and those of a variety of fields of scientific research, as well as of the history of science and technology.