ANNETTE KEHNEL begins her book with a bleak account of our modern condition. We are on the brink of a human-made environmental apocalypse, driven by our relentless consumption, and our only solutions are Enlightenment-era beliefs in progress, growth, and maximisation. The alternative? We need to open our minds to other ways of life by learning more about history, and particularly the European Middle Ages.

There follows a tour through examples of sustainable medieval practices: sharing resources within villages or monasteries, repairing and reusing materials, lending small amounts to the poor, and Franciscan poverty. Her range in both time and space (into the 18th century, with plenty of references to contemporary research) is impressive, and her examples are richly varied and described with depth and nuance. Her tone is passionate, sometimes even despairing, but also clear and funny. “Depop, monastery-style” is one heading.

Kehnel tends, as this suggests, to introduce examples as medieval versions of modern practices, but, in her analyses, she often finds more profound cultural differences in human-environment relations. My favourite, perhaps, is how one Cistercian described a river by a monastery as a kind of colleague.

Although her case studies tend to be presented as better alternatives to the present day, she is alert to their shortcomings. Despite the book’s title, the Middle Ages was not an environmentalist’s paradise.

Not all readers will agree with Kehnel’s analysis of the present — which leaves out postmodernity with its plurality of priorities and narratives — but, even for those who do, her answer risks entrenching the modernist ideologies that she so ferociously criticises. We need to pull our socks up, she writes, improve ourselves, and get on with fixing the world. She is not against grand narratives: we just need new and better ones. But such faith in individual intention and action would have been foreign to the Middle Ages, and might itself have contributed to our current crises.

Full disclosure: like Kehnel, I am a historian. Like her, I believe that history shows that, apparently, inevitabilities are usually contingent, and that grand narratives of decline or progress are misleading. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I also believe that an expansive knowledge of the past is essential to reflecting on the present, even if I am unsure that the “we” whom she often addresses simply need to buckle up to make the difference. But her book is a great success in reminding of us just how rich and varied the lives of our forebears were, and thus, as she points out, how varied those of our successors could be.

Dr Gabriel Byng is a Fellow at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (CUP, 2017).

The Green Ages: Medieval innovations in sustainability
Annette Kehnel
Profile £25
(978-1-80081-625-1)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50