Dance of Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe : Environmental Stress, Mortality and Social Response

This volume investigates environmental and political crises that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, and considers their effects on people’s lives. At this time, the fragile human existence was imagined as a ‘Dance of Death’, where anyone, regardless of social status or age, could perish unexpectedly. This book covers events ranging from cooling temperatures and the onset of the Little Ice Age, to the frequent occurrence of epidemic disease, pest infestations, food shortages and famines.

Covering the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, this collection of essays considers a range of countries between Iceland (to the north), Italy (to the south), France (to the west) and the westernmost parts of Russia (to the east). This wide-reaching volume considers how deeply climate variability and changes affected and changed society in the late medieval to early modern period, and asks what factors, other than climate, interfered in the development of environmental stress and socio-economic crises.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental and Climate History, Environmental Humanities, Medieval and Early Modern History and Historical Geography, as well as Climate Change and Environmental Sciences.

Andrea Kiss is a research fellow at the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, also affiliated with the Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences at the University of Szeged in Hungary.

Kathleen Pribyl is an associate fellow at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, and also affiliated with the Oeschger Centre of Climate Change Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland.