Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages

Causes, Definitions, and Historiography

Edited by Adam Franklin-Lyons Edited by Timothy P. Newfield

Book cover: Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages

Extent: 375 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Series: International Medieval Research

Series volume number: 27

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(August 2026)

ISBN: 9782503621296

Price: $138.00

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Synopsis
Contributing Authors

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 II’s reign to those of Charlemagne’s, from Scandinavia to Spain, the volume expands the way we think about substance crises throughout medieval Europe.

Edited by Adam Franklin-Lyons
Edited by Timothy P. Newfield

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Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages

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