Dr Lucy Donkin (History of Art, University of Bristol) has published a new book on holy ground in the middle ages.
Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces.
The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.
Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people’s identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.
Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.
Can history help?
Building against disaster
Buildings are a good, practical place to start.
Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.
NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.
Historic building with diagonal struts at Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017
This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.
Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.
An old (c. 400 years?) rammed-earth residential building near Paro, Bhutan. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017
In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.
But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.
Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.
Long-term health impacts
Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.
History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.
For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.
Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.
From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.
This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.
Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate. Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.
Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.
History in action
In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.
Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.
These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.
The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.
