‘Readings in Roman Environmental Thought’

Yale Environmental Humanities was launched in 2018 as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world. 

Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of courses at Yale — including the one featured here. Read an overview and explore other course features.

This wasn’t a typical class session in this advanced Latin course. Instead of sitting in a classroom translating ancient texts, students were gathered in the kitchen of Jonathan Edwards College for a hands-on lesson in baking with ancient grains. 

Their professor, Kirk Freudenburg, also an experienced baker, had already prepared bread dough from spelt that had been ground in his stone mill. (For fun, and a late lunch, he had also prepared pizza dough and toppings.) 

In an earlier class, Freudenburg and the students had attempted to grind spelt by hand (mostly unsuccessfully) by using the ancient technique of banging bags of wheat stalks on the ground to release the grains. 

“It was a good exercise in learning how difficult it was to make flour in ancient Rome,” said Rachel Jacquay, a Yale junior from Florida. “Sometimes we banged the wheat too much, sometimes we banged too little.” 

Freudenburg, the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics, usually uses translations of Roman environmental thought, but this year he decided to teach from the original Latin. 

“There’s a way in which we can get more into the details of ancient thought about the environment by getting deeply into the Latin,” he said. “It’s kind of everywhere you look, whether you’re looking at epic poetry, or philosophical treatises on nature. You can look at Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History,’ or Seneca the Younger’s ‘Natural Questions.’ Then you have great poets like Horace and Virgil who have lots of things to say about attitudes toward nature.

After about 30 minutes, the spelt loaf was finished baking. Freudenburg pulled the pan out of the oven and released the small brown loaf onto the counter. 

“Not much to look at,” he said. “Very rustic.”

Adele Auchincloss, a junior and a Classics major from New York, said she enjoyed the course because “it’s been fun to read authors I’ve read before in different contexts.” She took it primarily because she had heard good things about Freudenburg. And she wasn’t disappointed: “He’s done a really good job of breaking the course up with fun things in between the challenging material.”