Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages. Causes, Definitions, and Historiography

Hardback, Pages: 376, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:21 col., 10 tables b/w., Language: English. ISBN 9782503621296. Summary 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. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I. Famine Basics Introduction ADAM FRANKLIN-LYONS and TIMOTHY NEWFIELD Surveying Medieval Famines: Paradigm Shifts and New Developments PERE BENITO I MONCLÚS Part II. Interpreting Famine in Early Medieval Texts Food Shortages, Famines, and Conceptions of Disaster in John Malalas JONAS BORSCH Fighting Famine: Environment, Agriculture, Intellectual Knowledge, and Charlemagne's Crisis Management STEPHAN EBERT Drought, Famine, and Plague in Adso of Montier-en-Der's Miracles of St Mansuy CONOR KOSTICK Part III. Interpreting Famine in Late Medieval Texts Interpreting Famine: Human and Divine Causation in Fourteenth-Century Valencia ADAM FRANKLIN-LYONS and POL SERRAHIMA I BALIUS Dearths, Famines, and Mortality Crises in the Crown of Aragon (1200-1275) ANTONI RIERA I MELIS Identifying Famine in Medieval Sources: Early Fourteenth-Century England PHILLIPP R. SCHOFIELD Part IV. Medieval Famine, Paleoclimatology, and 'Environmental Triggers' Food Shortages and Climate in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian Europe, 750-950 TIMOTHY NEWFIELD and INGA LABUHN Subsistence Crises, Mass Mortality, Epidemic Disease, and Drought in Early Medieval Europe and the Near East, 750-1000 CE FRANCIS LUDLOW and CONOR KOSTICK Interlocking Climate and Society: Climate and Harvest Failure in Sixth-Century Scandinavia INGAR MØRKESTØL GUNDERSEN and EVELIEN VAN DIJK Index 0 g.…