Lucifer's Land

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 themselves and those who chiseled them into existence have largely faded from view.

Lucifer’s Land invites readers into the social, cultural, and material world of premodern miners. Instead of focusing on what came out of mines, G. Geltner follows the rural communities who created the sector in the first place and explores the challenges they faced and the impacts they had on their surroundings. Drawing on a wide array of historical and archaeological sources, Geltner argues that miners’ transformation of rural society, culture, and environments was and has been substantial and lasting. The need to attract able workers and maintain them in remote locations led elites to revise labor and property laws, enhance infrastructures, and fend off wary neighbors. Miners themselves established hundreds of settlements, adapted to and altered habitats, and developed demanding work regimes both above and below the ground. They also learned how to deal with the dangers presented by remote and subterranean environments, including food scarcity, rock collapses, lung disease, as well as working alongside spirits, demons and even the Devil himself. Although miners’ techniques were mostly manual, they triggered major landscape changes: accelerated erosion, the displacement of flora and fauna, the clogging and rerouting of waterways, the intensification of floods and avalanches, and the pollution of the air, waters, and soils, sometimes for centuries to come. While some communities flourished and transitioned into lively villages, towns, and even cities, many others helped set Europe on a course of massive environmental degradation.

Reconstructing the diverse trajectories of these preindustrial miners, Lucifer’s Land offers a new account of the dynamism and creativity of the non-elite rural societies of premodern Europe.