This book has explored the entanglement ofenvironmental theory with ideas about culturalprogress and eschatology in western Europe in theperiod 950–1250. The new frame that emerged wasmarked by two strands in particular: the translationmotif, articulating the alleged shift of power andlearning from east to west and past to present; andthe imagination of communities as moral and naturalcollectivities, enhanced by the dissemination ofGraeco-Arabic environmental theory focusing on thesituation where peoples dwelled. These twodiscourses together gave monks, schoolmen andcourtiers a rhetorical toolkit to compareethnotypes, justifying colonization and conquestefforts using Ciceronian and, later, Aristotelianconcepts of governance and an ordered society. Theextent to which this narrative continued to shapethe colonization discourses of Europeans settling inthe Americas has yet to be vigorously researched,following the significant steps taken by, amongothers, Muldoon, Heng and, earlier, Pagden.

In the process, between circa 950 and 1250, learnedmonks and clerics in western Europe reconfigured theimagined boundaries of ethnic communities,regrouping the markers of the genealogical–religiousframework spatially. The rhetorical focusincreasingly lay on the sweetness, fecundity orharsh conditions of territories and the rationality,legal and social infrastructure and work ethic ofthe peoples populating them. The rhetorical use ofethnotypes occurred foremost in the military sphere,advanced by western European courts working outmilitary strategies while positioning themselves ascentres of culture. The ethnic self-images thatcourtiers forged and appropriated thereby reflectedthe ideal reputation of the elite, emphasizingurbanity, disciplined good manners and speech.

In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies, beyond the scope of this book, scholarsemploying the Greek metaphor of the body politicbegan to comment upon and expand the idea thatbodies politic had agency, based on climate theory,and existed in pursuit of a common good. As JoelKaye argued in A History ofBalance, society and the marketplace nowbecame considered as a self-referential organismseeking a balanced hierarchy to maintain itsvitality, whose boundaries balanced upon specific,physical classification as well as socialstation.

The centres of learning played a key role in thearticulation of these ideas.