Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages
Causes, Definitions, and Historiography
Drawing on history, medieval studies, archaeology, and the natural sciences, this volume presents nine new histories of medieval food shortages and two papers that set the stage for the next generation of work of famine in the Middle Ages.
Famine is a well-known subject to many medievalists. New approaches and evidence, however, continue to expand our possible knowledge about food shortage in the Middle Ages. The studies in this volume develop medieval famine research along two paths, one new, and one newly expanding. The first investigates how medieval actors themselves described, understood, and hence responded to food shortages, using sources across the timespan of the Middle Ages. The second explores the intersections between historical climatology, paleoclimatology, and food production. The nine histories of food shortage that the volume presents demonstrate that medieval actors responded according to their understanding of the disasters they faced, in sometimes sophisticated and in sometimes contradictory ways, and that we have much to gain by adopting a rigorous approach to both the written evidence for subsistence crises and weather patterns and to the novel scientific evidence for past climate change. An exhaustive historiographical survey of the subject and an introduction help set the stage for a next generation of work on famine in the Middle Ages. From the crises of Edward IIās reign to those of Charlemagneās, from Scandinavia to Spain, the volume expands the way we think about substance crises throughout medieval Europe.
Other Titles in this Series
Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe
Complexities, Contradictions, Transformations, c. 1100-1500
Volume 22
The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850-c. 1550
Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body
Volume 12
Languages of Love and Hate
Conflict, Communication, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean
Volume 15
The Vocation of Service to God and Neighbour
Essays on the Interests, Involvements and Problems of Religious Communities and their Members in Medieval Society
Volume 5
Exile in the Middle Ages
Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8-11 July 2002
Volume 13
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