Regional Mountain Conference

The life of the Tyrolean priest and itinerant teacher Adolf Trientl (1817–1897) serves as a biographical lens onto 19^th century histories of knowledge and environment: By bridging rational, academic science and practical knowledge, Trientl wrote for both scholarly outlets and popular almanacs. His oeuvre addresses alpine pasture, dairying, forestry, arable farming, and advances reflections on natural hazards in the Alps.
This poster presents the concept of an ongoing dissertation project by addressing the following triad of questions: How was agrarian‑environmental knowledge about the Tyrolean cultural landscape produced, processed, and transmitted? How did Trientl mediate between expert science and rural practical knowledge? What roles did almanacs and other media play as infrastructures of knowledge?
The corpus of historical sources for answering these questions centers on Trientl’s publications and is further contextualized by ego‑documents, historical land records, newspapers, journals, administrative and legal sources. Methodologically, an effort is made to evaluate these sources using approaches from the sociology of knowledge in order to understand the historical discourse on agrarian reform in Tyrol. By integrating economic, social, and environmental history, the study aims to reinterpret Tyrolean mountain agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century as a site of knowledge negotiation. It argues that Trientl’s hybrid authority enabled the co‑production of agrarian improvement schemes and environmental understandings, from manure economies to forest management and hazard mitigation. Finally, the project situates local expertise within wider contemporary debates on climate, landscape change, and sustainability.