Inverting Exoticism: How Rabbits Colonised the Low Countries (1250-1700)

The Environmental Humanities Network, RAS Research Group within Sustainable Landscapes & Regions, invites you to a lecture on 6 October 2025 by Jim van der Meulen (Huygens Instituut)!

This lecture traces how the European rabbit, introduced to the Low Countries from 1250, escaped human-controlled spaces to disrupt peasant livelihoods and colonise the landscape. Using a local map drawn in 1640, we ask how a formerly alien species became naturalised and established itself in the wild, and what this reveals about categories such as wild, natural, and invasive in the archaeology of the Anthropocene.