Abigail Agresta

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I am a doctoral candidate in medieval European history, with a focus on environmental history and the western Mediterranean.  My dissertation, “Many Waters: An Environmental History of Valencia, 1300-1500,” analyzes how the council of the city of Valencia, Spain, governed their environment in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  It serves as a case study for a cultural approach to environmental history, using the records of the council’s interventions in the landscape to reconstruct their understanding of the natural world.  I demonstrate that the way that the council imagined the role of God in the landscape was directly connected to the fraught religious history of this region, the only place in medieval Europe with a minority Christian population. My research has been supported by a Fulbright Award and grants from the Yale Macmillan Center, Program in Agrarian Studies, and Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies. 

 

I am interested in the concept of convivencia, the living together of different religious groups in medieval Iberia. My first article, “The Doctor and the Notary: A Latinate Jewish Will from Fourteenth-Century Catalonia,” published in Viator 46:1 (2015), reconstructs the unusual willmaking process of a Jewish doctor, arguing that his intention was to disinherit a brother who had converted to Christianity.

 

I received my B. A. with highest honors in Medieval Studies and History from Swarthmore College in 2009.  In 2010, I completed a Master of Studies in Medieval History at Oxford University.  I received my M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale in 2013.