the shock to reinvigorate medieval economic history? version for this onference use only. do not...

Draft version for this Conference use only. Do not quote without author’s permission.

The shock to reinvigorate medieval economic history?

Daniel R. Curtis

(Utrecht University/Leiden University) ([email protected])

Bas van Bavel (Utrecht University) ([email protected])

Tim Soens (University of Antwerp) ([email protected])

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Abstract: : If economic historians are currently having an inward reflection about the precarious state of the field in recent years, then the overall decline in fortunes can be doubled for medieval economic history. In this paper, it is suggested that one way of reviving the flagging field is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one ‘laboratory’ in which hypotheses posed by sociologists, economists, and even scientists of the laboratories can be explicitly tested, especially using the dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. More specifically, the paper goes on to make the case for medieval economic history being stimulated by the field of ‘Disaster Studies’. Historians have failed to interact with ideas from other disciplines such as Disaster Studies, because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because there has been a twin conception that the anthropocene is vastly different to the medieval disaster context and that medieval coping strategies were in any case hindered by providence, superstition, fear and the unknown. These are refuted. In the final stages of the paper, we suggest that medieval economic historians should have more confidence in making a real contribution to big historical narratives of our time: issues such as climate change and inequality. Our contribution can be in (a) offering reconstructions of recovery of societies over the long-term (moving disaster studies away from instant impact focus) and (b) contextualising new quantitative datasets produced by historical climatologists, bioarchaeologists, economists, and so on, in this era of ‘big data’.

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mailto:[email protected]



Old and New Worlds: the Global Challenges of Rural History | International Conference, Lisbon, ISCTE-IUL, 27-30 January 2016

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1. The precarious state of medieval economic history

The so-called ‘cultural’ or ‘linguistic’ turn that history took around the end of the 1980s ultimately pushed social and economic historians to the side-lines of the discipline. Social history was the first to have an extreme inward reflection of the state of its own field. In the same way that social historians of the Annales School in the 1960s had taken to task ‘traditional’ history based on military and political events and ‘great men’ and ‘elites’, social historians were challenged by a new post-modernist line of thinking which questioned some of the previously accepted definitions and processes of categorisation commonly employed. History suddenly became an ‘undecidable infinity of possible truths’.1 The field of economic history had a somewhat lesser amount of inward soul-searching: what became clear was that economic historians were increasingly starting to retreat away from the other fields of history, and find a ‘safer haven’ in the grounds of econometrics. Although the cliometric approach to economic history had taken root in the 1960s,2 its popularity soared from 1990s onwards – made feasible by the ability to compile large amounts of data and perform quicker calculations through the wider access to computers. It was actually only this turn towards greater reliance on econometric methods, rather than the initial ‘cultural turn’ of the historical profession as a whole, that in the end stimulated some sort of inward reflection from economic historians about what they were actually doing and the state of the field as it was in the early 2000s. It may also have been that they were experiencing some sort of rejection from both ends: from the other fields of the historical discipline, but also ignored from the mainstream of the economics discipline.3 In recent years this lack of consensus on the position and direction of economic history has come to a head: an issue of the journal ‘Historically Speaking’ in 2010 devoting passionate contributions from some of the top names in the field discussing the ‘The Neglected Field of Economic History’, while the appearance of the book ‘The Poverty of Clio’ by Francesco Boldizzoni in 2011, directly challenging the apparent hold of cliometrics over the profession, provoked extreme reactions in both praise and (oft-entertaining) rebuttal.4

Ultimately the overall decline (or perhaps lack of acceptance) of the discipline of economic history can be revealed by the flagging number of articles on economic themes that have been accepted into the premier general history journals. In Past and Present, for example, economic history articles are at their lowest percentage than they have ever been since the journal’s inception in 1952.5 In the 1970s and the 1980s, economic history was a key component of the journal’s reputation for strong and vigorous debate, as seen in clashes over the role of agrarian capitalism (the Brenner Debate) and the ‘Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’. Even in the 1990s, economic issues (partially) took a prominent role in the debates over the ‘Feudal Revolution’. Since 2000, however, economic history has offered no such contribution to significant debates in the journal, and if it were not for a special issue in 2007 dedicated to Rodney Hilton, the percentage of articles devoted to economic history would have been much lower than the 18.2% recorded below.

1 N. Vaughan-Williams, ‘International Relations and the ‘Problem of History’,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34 (2005): 129. 2 On its early achievements see D. McCloskey, ‘The Achievements of the Cliometric School,’ Journal of Economic History 38 (1978): 13-28. 3 J. Mokyr, ‘On the Supposed Decline and Fall of Economic History,’ Historically Speaking 11 (2010): 23-5. 4 F. Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton NJ, 2011). See the reviews of D. McCloskey, ‘The Povery of Boldizzoni: Resurrecting the German Historical School,’ Investigaciones de Historia Económica 9 (2013): 2-6; E. Jones, ‘Review,’ American Historical Review 117 (2012): 157-8. 5 The categorization of ‘economic history’ articles is not straightforward, since many Past and Present articles transcend a number of sub-fields. Articles, therefore, have been classified as ‘economic history’ when the main subject relates to trade and commerce, population, human capital and knowledge, money, finance and banking, business history, and industry.


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Whatever decline in fortunes that economic history now faces, however, can be doubled in the case of medieval economic history. Indeed, the fact that the mainstream of the economic history discipline has taken refuge in (a) econometrics and (b) the compilation of enormous digital datasets, this has had a negative knock-on impact for those economic historians of the Middle Ages because, quite simply, these kinds of methods are less suitable for research into the medieval period. Data is not only much scarcer, but is often not as readily quantifiable, making it difficult to fit into the basic tenets of the ‘big data’ model that most of the economic history journals either follow, or are beginning to follow. The continuing move towards the ‘macro’ and, more specifically, the desire to offer reconstructions of, for example, GDP across large parts of the globe going back in time, not only works generally to the disadvantage of the study of the medieval period, but furthermore privileges a small island in Europe which has the good fortune to have manorial accounts at its disposal, to the detriment of all those places in Europe (the majority) which do not.6 Elsewhere the recent OECD report on ‘How was Life?’ makes the positive move away from the reliance on traditional economic indicators of well-being to offer massive global datasets on living standards across the globe between 1820 and 2000,7 and yet, we have to wonder how many of these same indicators can be reconstructed going back much further in time – all the way to the Middle Ages? Very few, in all likelihood, and ultimately this always will lead to privileging of the recent centuries over the distant past. The recent ‘History Manifesto’, as a call to arms to historians interested in promoting the role of history for contemporary society, is very positive about the association between new forms of digitalised ‘big data’ and our ability to eschew short-term approaches to the past in favour, once again, of the longue durée – essentially laudable sentiments.8 And yet we have a paradox that many of these ‘big data’ approaches are not altogether employable for periods as far back

6 See of course the recent S. Broadberry, B. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton & B. van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 (Cambridge, 2015). 7 J.L. van Zanden, J. Baten, M. Mira d’Ercole, A. Rijpma, C. Smith & T. Marcel (eds), How was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820 (OECD Publishing, 2014). 8 J. Guidi & D. Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014).


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as the Middle Ages – and when they are, only for limited parts of the world. Big data and the long term do not go as seamlessly hand-in-hand as Guidi and Armitage tend to suggest.

If we look at the fortunes of medieval history since the 1940s in the top two economic history journals, the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review, we can easily trace a diminished role over time. In the Journal of Economic History this is less clear since, quite simply, the medieval period has never really taken an important position within the journal –


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often taking up less than 5% of the total published output per decade. In the Economic History Review, however, this trend of diminished importance is very clear – in the heydays of the 1960s, the medieval period took up almost a fifth of the total published output, but since the 1990s, this has dropped to just a tenth. While in the 1960s one could expect at least one medieval article in the journal per issue, nowadays it is more like one article per 4-issue volume. If one does appear, it is often on England or Britain. Elsewhere, in newer forums such as the European Review of Economic History, things are not so different: just over 5% of the articles published in this journal since its inception in 1997 have been dedicated to the medieval period. Furthermore, in specifically medieval forums for published research, there is barely one article per 4-issue volume devoted to economic concerns appearing now in the Journal of Medieval History, while the journal Speculum has all but abandoned any kind of economically-oriented topic.

At the moment, medieval economic history is in grave danger of disappearing almost entirely. In many history faculties in universities around the world today, social and economic history departments are often separate from medieval history departments, which are more likely to be interested in medieval culture, art and literature under the broader umbrella of the term ‘medieval studies’. What is more worrying is that the most prominent names in medieval economic history, those that have been flying the flag for the past 25-30 years or more, are becoming increasingly noticeable by their absence. In the UK alone, a place with a fine record of medieval economic history, we have seen in recent years the retirements from official academic duties of top scholars such as Christopher Dyer, Bruce Campbell, John Hatcher, and Richard Smith, as well as the passing of Richard Britnell. In recent times we have also lost Canadian medievalist, John Munro – sadly indirectly relating to another trend: economic historians outside of Europe are very rarely looking to study European medieval history. In the past this certainly was the case: Zvi Razi, Israeli expert of late-medieval rural economy and society, or Yoshiko Morimoto, the Japanese expert of Carolingian economy, being two good examples. Indeed, out of hundreds of sessions over 5 days at the recent World Economic History Congress in Kyoto, Japan, only a handful of sessions could be found with an explicitly medieval topic. This is, of course, the logical effect of the ‘provincialization of Europe’ and increasing scientific globalization, which has had knock-on effects for chronology: ‘medieval’ is generally a relevant concept for Europe – increasingly problematic to apply to the Middle East, and almost redundant to apply to parts of the world even further away.9

Such a decline in the fortunes of medieval economic history has come at a particularly bad time, because the severe economic downturn we have faced over the past number of years has created restrictions on the amount of research that can be funded, creating unprecedented levels of competition between scholars, not only within disciplines, but between disciplines. Indeed, this level of competition does not just apply for the extremely large research grants from the European Research Council (ERC), where the success ratios are known to be as low as 5% in the humanities and social sciences, but also for early career scholars looking for independent research fellowships – in 2015 nearly 1000 scholars applied for the 45 fellowships offered by the British Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences. The difficulty for medieval historians then is pronounced by the fact that funding bodies are increasingly asking scholars to be very explicit in the ‘social relevance’ of their research: direct deliverables, valorisation, and knowledge utilisation. As one can imagine, these kinds of things are not always the hallmark of medieval historical research. Medieval historians do not solve contemporary societal problems, even if the evidence they produce might allow us to view or approach contemporary problems in new ways.

9 Despite the positive emergence of new academic forums such as ‘The Medieval Globe’ journal in 2014, its first issue devoted to the global impact of the Black Death.


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Of course some medievalists will see this as a sad state of affairs, and outright reject what could be considered a crass utilitarian view of education, or denounce the commercialisation and commodification of the research process itself. But putting such disappointments aside, is this really the right way to go? Will this kind of attitude invoke any change for the better? Rather than taking a defensive stance against the increasing need to offer some sort of ‘social relevance’ as ‘justification’ for our research, perhaps medieval economic historians should start exhibiting some greater levels of confidence in demonstrating exactly what makes our research so significant for contemporary societies? Rather than putting up a wall against the outside, we should be openly flaunting our qualities that can help contribute to furthering real scientific debates with relevance for the present – a sentiment shared in the recent ‘History Manifesto’. In the remainder of this paper, it is suggested that one way of doing this is for medieval economic historians to take one foot out of the archive (at least partially), and focus less on description and more on analysis by linking up more explicitly with ideas, theories and hypotheses taken from other disciplines of the social sciences, and perhaps also interacting more explicitly with the kinds of data produced from the more laboratory-based disciplines of the natural sciences. Indeed, one of those fields that medieval economic history may be invigorated by is the blossoming sociological field of Disaster Studies. This field has in recent years posed a number of interesting hypotheses as to why some societies cope more effectively in the face of exogenous shocks and hazards, some of which are being tested on contemporary societies, and yet these new trendy ideas have barely filtered on through to the traditional historical disciplines. Nonetheless, this could be a highly profitable future avenue for medieval economic historians to go – particularly since some high-profile historical works such as Geoffrey Parker’s book on global climatic crises of the 17th century and Bruce Campbell’s 2010 Tawney Memorial Lecture on the climatic instability of the 14th century have tried to assert the role of the environment and climate in stimulating major economic, societal, and political change as a real historical protagonist, though always working in tandem with endogenous societal characteristics.10

The remainder of the paper is then divided up into the following sections: in section two the field of Disaster Studies is briefly introduced, with a discussion of why these ideas have not filtered through into the traditional historical discipline. Then in section three, it is shown why the Middle Ages are a good ‘laboratory’ for further research into societal and economic responses from severe environmental shocks and hazards, with a particular emphasis on (a) the capacity to perform new kinds of comparative experiments and assess economic and societal change and continuities not just in the immediate aftermath of shocks but over very long chronologies, and (b) to demonstrate that in this era of ‘big data’ and digitalisation, whatever new figures might be uncovered over the long term, for example from the burgeoning fields of historical climatology going back into the Middle Ages, this data will only make sense and have value by being assessed within very specific historical contexts – the kinds of contextual conditions that medieval historians in particular have a very good understanding of.

2. Disaster Studies and its lack of translation to history

Academic and non-academic interest into hazards and shocks, and the disasters that can ensue, has never been stronger. Books focusing on the collapse of whole societies and civilisations under environmental strain have achieved international best-seller status,11 and this is perhaps unsurprising given that such dangers have not dissipated with time – if

10 B. Campbell, ‘Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in Pre-Industrial England,’ Economic History Review 63 (2010): 281-314; G. Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013). 11 J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005).


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anything, the transition to ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ has made many of our lives inherently more ‘risky’ if Ulrich Beck is to be believed.12 In academia, this broader interest has been translated into a thriving field of ‘Disaster Studies’ – emerging from its early roots as a facet of the natural sciences into a discipline more in line with the social sciences. In fact, under the early guidance of one of the discipline’s true pioneers, Henry Quarantelli, ‘Disaster Studies’ scholars have now iterated that environmental hazards cannot be seen as merely ‘natural occurrences’,13 but as social, cultural and political processes that test the capacity of societies to organise themselves, limit the initial destabilisation, and then move onto a stage of recovery.14 In effect, some societies, just in the way they are set up, ordered, or arranged, can be more capable of dealing with shocks and hazards than others. Although material aspects such as technology, wealth, and infrastructure are still often invoked as explanatory factors in the differential capabilities of societies to deal with shocks and hazards, with an essentialist approach towards disaster proposing solutions and technologies applicable regardless of social and historical context,15 recent failures of even the wealthiest and most technologically-advanced countries in the world has also instructed us that technical knowledge and economic resources do not inevitably lead to more effective short-term responses or long-term recoveries,16 but rather more important is the institutional and cultural framework that channels their use.17

A shift away from the ‘natural environment’, the catastrophic ‘event’, and technocratic ideology, together with a heightened focus on the intrinsic qualities of societies themselves, should be good news for historians. However, despite a disparate body of literature dealing with ‘historical disasters’, very little of this work has, as of yet, explicitly linked up with the more sociological and theoretical ideas put forward in the contemporary ‘Disaster Studies’ discipline. While a broad range of social science fields have actively attempted to try and define and measure different elements of ‘risk’, ‘resilience’, and ‘vulnerability’, and offered up new kinds of hypotheses to test relating to the coping capacity of different societies, such

12 See the classic U, Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992). 13 H. Quarantelli, ‘Disaster Studies: An Analysis of the Social Historical Factors Affecting the Development of Research in the Area,’ International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 5 (1987): 285=310. Also R. Dynes, ‘The Comparative Study of Disaster: A Social Organizational Approach,’ Mass Emergencies 1 (1975): 21-31. And more recently in O, Cardona, ‘The Need for Rethinking the Concepts of Vulnerability and Risk from a Holistic Perspective: A Necessary Review and Criticism for Effective Risk Management,’ in Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People, eds. G. Bankoff, G. Frerks and D. Hilhorst (London, 2004), 37-51; T. Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford, 2000). 14 P. Blaikie, T. Cannon, I. Davis and B. Wisner, At Risk. Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters (London, 2004 [1994]); K. Tierney, ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream? Disaster Research at the Crossroads,’ Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 503-25; M. Pelling, The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience (New York, 2012 [2003]). 15 See the debates laid out in S. Revet, ‘Penser et affronter les désastres: un panorama des recherches en sciences sociales et des politiques internationals,’ Critique Internationale 3 (2011): 157-73. A feature of this technocratic view is often the optimistic notion that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market would always ensure technoogical innovation to meet with climate change problems ; N. Shafik, ‘Economic development and environmental quality: an econometic analysis’, Oxford Economic Papers 46 (1994) 757-73. 16 C. Hartman and G. Squires, There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (Abingdon, 2006). 17 E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, 1990); A. Sen, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1988); D. Hilhorst, ‘Disaster, Conflict and Societies in Crises: Everyday Politics of Crisis Response,’ in Disaster, Conflict and Societies in Crises: Everyday Politics of Crisis Response, ed. D. Hilhorst (London, 2013), 9-11.


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ideas have hardly filtered on through to elements of the traditional historical discipline.18 Evidence for this lack of integration can be found in the fact that well-established journals such as ‘Disasters’ and the ‘International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters’ have an absolute paucity of articles devoted to disasters before the 20th century. In a recent overview from an important ‘Disaster Studies’ handbook, fields as diverse as sociology, law, anthropology, environmental sciences, demography, geography, economics, development studies, media studies, psychology, and public administration are mentioned, but history is entirely absent.19

Such lack of integration may partially be down to some level of resistance on the Disaster Studies side, but more than likely, it is the opposite that is to blame. The discipline of history has up to now not been able to sufficiently directly contribute to and integrate itself with some of the main ideas discussed by scholars of contemporary disasters, a blossoming area of social sciences research, because of the regrettable move away from the social sciences by the traditional historical profession.20 Now it seems more than ever that historians are convinced that the past in itself cannot be used to establish regularities, patterns, and certainly not laws, and to identify and test these through comparative analysis. One thing the historian fears more than anything is to be accused of being ‘deterministic’, and despite being well dismissed back in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of new forms of social history, it seems that ‘events’ and ‘narrative’ have made a partial revival in the mainstream of the historical discipline. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, historians were using historical perspectives as actual material for real public reform – scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm argued for the liberating use of history as a set of past precedents for contemporary change,21 and even earlier than this, Richard Tawney placing 20th-century struggles around peasant land seizures, expropriation, and landlordism in a deeper historical context going back to the early modern period.22 Nowadays in contrast, it has become difficult to use historical data and evidence in any kind of comparative way to test coherent theoretical models and frameworks, the sad state of affairs summarized in the following statement: ‘political [and social] scientists are more likely to be interested in past events for their own sake. […] [F]or the historian, the goal of theory building and testing is secondary – the past interests for itself’.23 As a result, the shifting position of history away from the social sciences has meant the ‘past’ has failed to be used as an adequate ‘laboratory’ for testing ideas and hypotheses with social relevance for the present – surely one the most important functions of history.24 As argued in the recent ‘History Manifesto’, long-term history should be a tool for understanding modern institutions, for rendering utopian schemes comprehensible, and for rendering revolutionary programmes for social change thinkable.25

18 U. Lübken & C. Mauch, ‘Uncertain Environments: Natural Hazards, Risk and Insurance in Historical Perspective,’ Environment and History 17 (2011): 4; G.J. Schenk, ‘Historical Disaster Research: State of Research, Concepts, Methods and Case Studies,’ Historical Social Research 32 (2007) 9-35; D. Curtis and B. van Bavel, ‘Better Understanding Disasters by Better Using History: Systematically Using the Historical Record as One Way to Advance Research into Disasters,’ International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters (forthcoming 2016). 19 D. McEntire, ed., Disciplines, Disasters and Divergence of Concepts, Issues and Trends from the Research Literature (Springfield CO, 2007). 20 B. van Bavel, ‘History as a Laboratory to Better Understand the Formation of Institutions,’ Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (2015): 69-91. 21 E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions,’ Past & Present 55 (1972): 3-17; On History (New York, 1997). 22 R. Tawney, A Memorandum on Agriculture and Industry in China (Honolulu, 1929); Land and Labour in China (London, 1932); The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912). 23 C. Elman and M. Elman, ‘Negotiating International History and Politics,’ in Bridges and Boundaries, eds. C. Elman and M. Elman (Cambridge MA, 2001), 7. 24 J. Diamond and J. Robinson, eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge MA, 2012). 25 Guidi & Armitage, History Manifesto, 24.


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Many scholars have recently lamented the fact that this seems to be epitomised in a drifting apart of social science and the humanities,26 but it is argued in this paper that the contribution of medieval economic historians (or even economic historians in general) may be to reverse or halt this growing chasm somewhat – instead forging a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities, which will be a difficult but likely valuable process – and one that can be initiated through the ‘arena’ of a more coherent agenda and approach to the study of historical disasters.

A second more specific block to the study of historical disasters, particularly for those working in the Middle Ages, has been the notion established that the Anthropocene, a new age of human-induced climatic, biological, and geophysical change, is far different to the ‘disaster context’ seen in the pre-industrial period. Apparently the roots of the Anthropocene cannot be traced further back in time than the Industrial Revolution and the transition from solar energy to fossil fuels, and even then, the global environment only changing profoundly after great acceleration in the post-2nd World War period.27 Much of this flies in the face of William McNeill’s proposition that the major turning-point regarding globalisation, and its environmental impact, came not in the modern age, but around 1000CE when new trade routes permitted a deeper pattern of global exchange.28 Furthermore, the work of Ulrich Beck, already mentioned, by establishing ‘risk’ as a logical bi-product of technological and intellectual modernity, with the artificial separation of nature and culture only being attributable to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, has in the process made us question the actual relevance of studying pre-modern disasters at all.29 This view has been further entrenched by a past tradition of cultural historical research into disasters focusing on ‘popular mentality’ and ‘perception’ that has cultivated an image of the medieval period, in particular, as a time of superstitious hysteria and hopelessness, with fear, the ‘unknown’ and faith being considerable barriers to both hazard mitigation, risk management, and long-term recovery. While scholars have come to question the somewhat arbitrary distinction between what is generally seen as the ‘medieval period’ and the ‘early modern period’,30 very persistent is the notion that the ‘pre-industrial’ or ‘Ancien Régime’ world had very little to compare itself with the modern age following the French Revolution.

The point here is not to dismiss the significance of the ‘religious’ response to hazards and shocks in the medieval period: indeed, it is clear that many responses centred around the power of prayer and devotion, charity and piety, the veneration of saints, and the use of relics. Much of this was based around the fact that the various religious orders portrayed such calamities as acts of divine retribution, and thus some attention was devoted towards correcting the social behaviour patterns that may have summoned God’s wrath in the first place. Scholars have gone as far as to describe this as a ‘sin economy’, with an emphasis on human malfeasance.31 Only by compensating for these sins could human suffering be reduced,

26 D. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago, 2010); ‘One More Step: An Agreeable Reply to Whaples,’ Historically Speaking 11 (2010): 22-3. 27 W. Steffen, P. Crutzen and J. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,’ Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: Ambio 36 (2007): 614-21; F. Oldfield et al., ‘The Anthropocene Review: Its Significance, Implications and the Rationale for a New Transdisciplinary Journal,’ The Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 3-7. 28 W. McNeill, ‘Organizing Concepts for World History,’ World History Bulletin 4 (1986-7): 1-4. 29 Revet, ‘Penser’. 30 W. Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History,‘ Journal of World History 3 (1992): 13-53; J. Bentley, ‘Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,’ American Historical Review 101 (1996): 749-70. 31 W. Behringer, ‘Die Krise von 1570. Ein Beitrag zur Krisengeschichte der Neuzeit,‘ in Um Himmels Willen. Religion in Katastrophenzeiten, eds. M. Jakubowski-Tiessen and H. Lehmann (Göttingen, 2003), 114-6; ‘Weeping in the Snow. The Second Period of the Little Ice Age-type Impacts, 1570-1630,’ in


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and evidence from prayer after the Black Death of the mid-14th century, for example, shows the pleading for mercy in a time of tribulation.32 So in Cologne, Germany, in 1374, the lowering of the flood levels was seen as a direct result of increased piety and devotion by the citizens,33 while in the early stages of the 1315 famine across many parts of Northern Europe, religious figures marched barefoot in the fields in recompense for the failed harvest.34 Later in the 15th century, mass processions continued to occur, bearing communal relics through the streets, with sermons encouraging congregations to ‘avoid sin’ – the official application of collective penitence.35 In numerous cases after severe disastrous occurrences, religious orders urged for greater sanctions to reinforce social norms such as the ending of over-indulgent celebrations and immodest behaviour.36

Thus on the surface, it appears that the historical study of disasters in the pre-modern period should be seen as quite different to that of modern times – loosening its social relevance for medieval economic historians. However, three points should be made in response to this. First of all, pre-modern ‘ordinary’ populations did not always simply do what religious or political elites told them. Despite the central importance of the Church for many societies in medieval Europe, medieval people did not act with one voice. The dominant ‘disaster discourse’ asserted by the Church was not always a proxy for wider societal response. To take a relevant example from the early modern period in the Northern Low Countries, Leo Noordegraaf and Gerrit Valk once argued that the Calvinist Church showed displeasure at acts of mitigation and human agency when confronted with terrible shocks such as plague bouts,37 but the point is, they actually had something to show displeasure about.38 That is to say, ordinary people, but even also priests themselves, did not merely passively accept their fate, but frequently looked to potions and cures, and were often found fleeing afflicted towns – escaping into the countryside, only to return when the worst effects had subsided. In fact, in direct opposition to this notion of increased piety and modesty after such catastrophic shocks, in the attempt to appease divine judgement from above, many societies in the wake of harvest failures, conflicts, and plagues have been adjudged to have descended into more selfish, self-preservationist kinds of behaviour such as the increases in petty crimes such as thievery from neighbours,39 violent acts and disorder,40 and even infanticide.41 Ordinary people, furthermore,

Kulturelle Konsequenzen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’ / Cultural consequences of the Little Ice Age, eds. W. Behringer, H. Lehmann and C. Pfister (Göttingen, 2005), 15. Not all have agreed with this concept of sin economy, however; see M. Juneja and F. Mauelshagen, ‘Disasters and Pre-Industrial Societies: Historiographic Trends and Comparative Perspectives,’ The Medieval History Journal 10 (2007): 21. 32 W. Paden, ‘An Occitan Prayer Against the Plague and its Tradition in Italy, France, and Catalonia,’ Speculum 89 (2014): 670-92. 33 C. Rohr, ‘Writing a Catastrophe. Describing and Constructing Disaster Perception in Narrative Sources from the Late Middle Ages,’ Historical Social Research 32 (2007): 88-102. 34 W.C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton NJ, 1996). 35 N. Murphy, ‘Plague Ordinances and the Management of Infectious Diseases in Northern French Towns, c.1450-c.1560,’ in The Fifteenth Century, Vol. XII: Society in an Age of Plague, eds. L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe (Woodbridge, 2013), 150. 36 G.J. Schenk, ‘…prima ci fu la cagione de la mala provedenza de’ Fiorentini…’ Disaster and ‘Life World’ – Reactions in the Commune of Florence to the Flood of November 1333,’ The Medieval History Journal 10 (2007): 355-86; S. Cohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002). 37 L. Noordegraaf &andG. Valk, De Gave Gods: de pest in Holland vanaf de late Middeleeuwen (Bergen, 1988) 38 As later recognised in L. Noordegraaf, ‘Calvinism and the Plague in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic’, in Curing and Insuring: Essays on Illness in Past Times: The Netherlands, Belgium, England and Italy, 16th-20th Centuries, ed. R. Dekker (Rotterdam, 1992), ? 39 After subsistence crises see B. Hanawalt, ‘Economic Influences on the Pattern of Crime in England, 1300-1348,’ American Journal of Legal History 18 (1974) : 281-97; C. Bouton, ‘Les mouvements de


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did not always just accept the attempts at social control from above through enforced modesty and piety: in fact some of the most severe riots and violent uprisings occurred in those plague years when local governments (on the advice of religious orders) tried to limit the number of participants at funerals and ban the practice of drinking at these events.42 Even more than the divine punishment in the form of plague, people had similar kinds of fear for the public health restrictions that inevitably ensued, lessening citizens’ freedoms, curtailing their ritual engagements, and impinging upon customary community ties and collective practices – and thus often being expressed in active or passive resistance to the prevailing discourse.43 It was, furthermore, not uncommon for religious interpretations of disasters to co-exist simultaneously with quasi-scientific remarks – the connection of events, conditions and processes (which while not necessarily being correct), had little to do with superstition. Plague was often linked to noxious smells and ‘dampness’, and sometimes also solar eclipses,44 and while two different shocks were often seen to be interrelated in some way in the sources, such as with the Black Death and earthquakes for example,45 they were also often simply seen as just a somewhat unexpected facet of daily life.

Secondly, religion and superstition did not preclude coping strategies in other ways either.46 Even if the occurrence of an actual shock or hazard was perhaps ‘out of their hands’ and some sort of divine intervention, medieval populations still attempted to mitigate the initial effects of an unexpected shock, and furthermore, even used such knowledge in order to reduce the risk of financial or human losses in the future. Alongside God’s intervention in human or natural affairs, these events also stimulated communal solidarity and neighbourliness, or alternatively afforded opportunity to affix blame and responsibility onto negligent neighbours or authorities.47 Medieval populations did not merely accept their fate, but actively attempted to avoid death by fleeing the scene in the wake of epidemics and earthquakes, and climbing onto the roofs of their houses or available boats during floods. In some of the most severe fires such as in Lucca in 1346, carpenters and stonemasons were called up to prevent the spread of

subsistance et le problème de l’économie morale sous l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution Française,’ Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 319 (2000): 711-100; Similar arguments made for contemporary patterns of weather change and harvest failures; see the very recent S.M. Hsiang, M. Burke and E. Miguel, ‘Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,’ Science 341 (2013): no. 6151; debated in H. Buhang, ‘Concealing Agreements over Climate-Conflict Results,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 111 (2014): E636. 40 In particular after the Black Death; W. Bowsky, ‘The Impact of the Black Death upon Sienese Government and Society,’ Speculum 39 (1964): 1-34; J. Chiffoleau, ‘La violence au quotidien Avignon au XIVe siècle d’après les registres de la cour temporelle,’ Mélanges d’École Française de Rome: Modernes 92 (1980): 325-71; D.L. Smail, ‘Telling Tales in Angevin Courts,’ French Historical Studies 20 (1997): 183-215; M. Shirk, ‘The Black Death in Aragon, 1348-1351,’ Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 357. 41 E. Coleman, ‘Infanticide in the Early Middle Ages,’ in Women in Medieval Society, ed. S.M. Stuard (Penn State, 1989 [1976]), 60. 42 F. Huisman, Stadsbelang en standsbesef. Gezondheidszorg en medisch beroep in Groningen, 1500-1730 (Rotterdam, 1992), ? 43 A. Coudert, ‘Sewers, Cesspools and Privies: Waste as Reality and Metaphor in Pre-Modern Cities,’ in Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. A. Classen (New York, 2008), 733. 44 Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, 229. 45 A. Akasoy, ‘Islamic Attitudes to Disasters in the Middle Ages: A Comparison of Earthquakes and Plagues,’ The Medieval History Journal 10 (2007): 387-410. 46 C. Gerrard and D. Petley, ‘A Risk Society? Environmental Hazards, Risk and Resilience in the Later Middle Ages in Europe,’ Natural Hazards 69 (2013): 1051-79. 47 J. Morgan, ‘Understanding Flooding Early Modern England,’ Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015): 48.


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the flames further by skilfully demolishing buildings.48 In the immediate aftermath (but frequently too late), urban governments by the 15th century were quickly drafting new legislation such as plague ordinances when confronted with outbreaks of epidemic disease, dictating new rules regarding isolation and treatment of the sick, the organisation of urban space, public health infringements, and trading practices.49 In times of harvest failure, urban governments could lower taxes on importations of foodstuffs, and found ways of negotiating or even coercing rural communities into providing the necessary labour reservoir to oversee and conduct repairs in times of flood.50 Manorial courts at times offered up modest amounts of resources for tenants in need,51 an element of feudal paternalism in practice, while food alms were distributed from hospitals,52 and special donations to the poor during periods of severe famine could be traced as far back as the early 11th century in some parts of Europe.53 Of course to some extent such acts of giving and charity were still tied up in acts of devotion and piety, because this was one of the main vehicles through which medieval populations could hope to secure ultimate personal salvation – perhaps being spared the ravages of the calamity that had just passed.54 This just brings home the duality of coping strategies in the medieval period, and that religious and ‘other’ concerns could coexist together – often indirectly entwined. Institutional and providential responses to terrible shocks could go hand-in-hand; absolving states and authorities from questions over their managerial culpability, for example.55

Structural adaptations over the long term also took place, too numerous to list in their entirety. People made adaptions to their settlement patterns, locating themselves on higher ground or on top of raised mounds to guard against future floods, rebuilt their settlements in new places or made adjustments to the settlement plan after earthquakes, or even moved towards new concentrated forms of habitation, perhaps fortified and moated, when faced with the prospect of conflict.56 Other societies developed new technologies in order to create new defensive structures such as dikes and ditches, and such water management systems often expanded from very localised networks to much more broader regional cooperation between communities further apart, reliant on new forms of financing and new forms of

48 K. Tragbar, ‘’De Hedificiis Communibus Murandis…’ Notes on the Beginning of Building Regulations in Medieval Tuscany,’ in Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Construction History, eds. M. Dunkeld, J. Campbell, H. Louw and M. Tutton (Cambridge, 2006), 3117-31. 49 G. Geltner, ‘Public health and the pre-modern city: a research agenda’, History Compass 10.3 (2012) 231-45; C. Rawcliffe, Urban bodies: communal health in late-medieval English towns and cities (Woodbridge 2013). 50 D. Curtis and M. Campopiano, ‘Medieval Land Reclamation and the Creation of New Societies. Comparing Holland and the Po Valley, c.800-c.1500,’ Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014): 93-108. 51 G. Duby, ‘Les pauvres des campagnes dans l’Occident medieval jusqu’au XIIIe siècle,’ Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France 52 (1966): 25-32; C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. Social Change in England, c.1200-1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 234-57; G. Riichardson, ‘The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions in Medieval English Agriculture,’ Journal of Economic History 65 (2005): 386-413. 52 C. Woolgar, ‘Gifts of Food in Late Medieval England,’ Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 6-18. 53 R. Naismith, ‘Turpe Lucrum? Wealth, Money and Coinage in the Millennial Church,’ in Money and the Church in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200, eds. G. Gasper and S. Gullbekk (Farnham, 2015), 28. 54 K. Dombrecht, ‘Plattelandsgemeenschappen, locale elites en ongelijkheid in het Vlaamse kustgebied (14de-16de eeuw): case-study: Dudzele ambacht‘ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Ghent, 2014), 336-9. 55 A. Sundberg, ‘Claiming the Past: History, Memory, and Innovation Following the Christmas Flood of 1717,’ Environmental History 20 (2015): 245-6. Also Morgan, ‘Understanding Floods’. 56 D. Curtis, ‘The Emergence of Concentrated Settlements in Medieval Western Europe: Explanatory Frameworks in the Historiography,’ Canadian Journal of History 48 (2013): 223-51.


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labour contribution.57 New forms of formalised corporate collective action were not only instigated by, but moulded and shaped by interactions with strong exogenous pressures from outside.58 Elsewhere, open fields may, to some extent, already have been one way of medieval rural communities predicting and anticipating future harvest failures – taking advantage of their risk-limitation facets through the scattering of parcels.59 Medieval producers also mixed their seeds in some cases; though lowering overall total yield, it would guard against the total failure of a harvest in a particular year.60 Some scholars have even argued that significant shocks such as the initial bout of Black Death in the mid-14th century brought with it long-term structural shifts in the practice of medieval medicine and provision of healthcare, perhaps even instigating the ‘modern psychology of the Renaissance’.61

And of course, a curious element to all this is that these coping mechanisms and adaptations were never universal and were connected to very specific contextual conditions: a point of further research is to understand why some medieval societies also failed to establish or enact these solutions, or rather their solutions took very different forms and manners. So, for example, it has been recently said that repeat occurrences of severe shocks over time, rather than one-off unheard of catastrophes, tended to reinforce, furthermore, a more sophisticated array of coping mechanisms and organisation based on applied knowledge.62 Cultural memory has now been regarded as a fundamental component of coping and learning from previous hazards.63 Scholars, therefore, have talked about particularly accomplished ‘aquatic cultures’ or ‘amphibious cultures’ in those regions prone to persistent floods,64 or ‘irrigation cultures’ in the case of those societies subject to the opposite trend of drought, erosion and lack of water,65 while the ‘seismic cultures’ term has been applied also to those societies that

57 M. van Tielhof, ‘Forced Solidarity: Maintenance of Coastal Defenses Along the North Sea Coast in the Early Modern Period,’ Environment and History 21 (2015) 319-50; T. Soens, ‘Floods and Money: Funding Drainage and Flood Control in Coastal Flanders from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries,’ Continuity and Change 26 (2011): 333-65. 58 T. De Moor, ‘The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe,’ International Review of Social History 53 (2008): 179-212; M. Casari, ‘Emergence of Endogenous Legal Institutions: Property Rights and Community Governance in the Italian Alps,’ Journal of Economic History 67 (2007): 191-226. 59 H. Renes, ‘Grainlands. The Landscape of Open Fields in a European Perspective,’ Landscape History 31 (2010): 37-70; D. McCloskey, ‘English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk,’ Research in Economic History 1 (1976): 124-70; ‘The Prudent Peasant: New Findings of Open Fields,’ Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 343-50. 60 J. Pretty, ‘Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor,’ Agricultural History Review 38 (1990): 1-19. 61 S. Cohn, Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2010), ch. 8. Though not all interpretations are in agreement; some arguing for continuities in the treatment and attitude towards the sick, pre- and post-plague; N. Siraisi, ‘The Physician’s Task: Medical Reputations in Humanist Collective Biographies,’ in Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600 (Leiden, 2001), 160. And some showing that advances in public health strategies often pre-dated the Black Death; C. Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late-Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge, 2013). 62 F. Mauelshagen, ‘Disaster and Political Culture in Germany since 1500,’ in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies towards a Global Environmental History, eds. C. Mauch and C. Pfister (Lanham MD, 2009), 44. 63 G. Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazards in the Philippines (London, 2003); C. Pfister, ‘‘The Monster Swallows You’: Disaster Memory and Risk Culture in Western Europe, 1500-2000,’ Rachel Carson Centre Perspectives (2011): 3; ‘Learning from Nature-Induced Disasters. Considerations from Historical Case Studies in Western Europe,’ in Natural disasters, eds. Mauch & Pfister, 17-40. 64 P. van Dam, ‘Denken over overstromingen, natuurrampen en het idee van de amfibische cultuur,’ Tijdschrift voor Waterstaatsgeschiedenis 21 (2012): 1-10. 65 T. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge MA, 1970).


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experienced frequent earthquake damage.66 Most pre-modern societies experienced hazards and shocks as part of their frequent and recurring ‘life experience’,67 even if this state of ‘preparedness’ was never constant and likely changed over time.68

Additionally, we must also realise that the impact of shocks and hazards during the medieval period was also mediated and filtered to some extent by the existence of cultural values and institutions that had nothing to do with disasters per se, but existed regardless.69 Rural societies’ response to shocks and hazards was dictated to some extent by deep-lying structural conditions such as the distribution and access to property.70 In times of harvest failure, those small peasants able to control their own food supply through autarky may have been able to fare better than those landless agricultural labourers more exposed to the vicissitudes of the market and had to buy their bread. In times of flooding in contrast, those small peasants with access to a piece of their own land may have been more vulnerable in the sense that their whole livelihood was tied up in the preservation of their land, whereas agricultural labourers may even have benefited from the increased work that was available in the reconstruction process. And of course, the capacity for medieval societies to use certain institutions to mitigate the effects of severe shocks and hazards was dictated to some extent by the precise contexts in which these institutions were embedded. The extent to which a medieval producer could look to the market to save them in times of hardship was dependent on the precise terms by which they could conduct trade: taxes and extra-economic burdens could prove to be powerful dissuaders. Similarly, the extent to which medieval societies could rely on taking resources from the commons often depended on the extent to which rights and privileges were bestowed down through the social hierarchy,71 while the extent to which rural producers could rely on systems of credit, insurance or support to ease their way through floods, periods of conflict, or harvest failures, was also dependent on the precise nature of reciprocal networks between groups and individuals at a very micro level.72 In the context of the Great Famine of 1315-7, it recently has been argued that the ‘generalized trust’ that was characteristic of trade in ‘normal’ years between strangers was broken, and accordingly, buyers and sellers had to switch to alternative reliable ‘particularized trust’, limited to small groups of local or regional communities based on personal networks of trust and reputation.73 In some cases wealthy creditors could take advantage of their less prosperous neighbours

66 J. Homan and W. Eastward, ’17 August 1999 Kocaelie (Izmit) Earthquake: Historical Records and Seismic Culture,’ Earthquake Spectra 17 (2001): 617-34. 67 G. Bankoff, ‘The ‘English Lowlands’ and the North Sea Basin System: A History of Shared Risk,’ Environment and History 19 (2013): 3-37. 68 Soens, ‘Floods and Money’. 69 Curtis & Van Bavel, ‘Better Understanding Disasters’. 70 D. Curtis, Coping with Crisis: The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-Industrial Settlements (Farnham, 2014), ch. 2. 71 D. Curtis, ‘Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidnece from across Western Europe, 1300-1800,’ Journal of Agrarian Change EV (2015): 1-19; M. De Keyzer, ‘The Impact of Different Distributions of Power on Access Rights to the Common Wastelands: The Campine, Brecklands, and Geest Compared,’ Journal of Institutional Economics 9 (2013): 517-42. 72 As seen later in the 18th- and 19th-centuries too; E. Vanhaute and T. Lambrecht, ‘Famine, Exchange Networks and the Village Community. A Comparative Analysis of the Subsistence Crises of the 1740s and the 1840s in Flanders,’ Continuity and Change 26 (2011): 155-86. 73 P. Slavin, ‘Market Failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315-1317),’ Past and Present 222 (2014): 9-49. And more generally S. Ogilvie, Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 2011), 427-32.


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during periods of sudden hardship, but in other cases, creditor-debtor relations was more reciprocal and less uni-directional.74

Thirdly and finally, it must be briefly noted that while religion and superstition may have been guided some of the coping responses that medieval societies took when faced with extreme shocks and hazards, we should not necessarily see this as an absolute contrast with modern society. In fact, understanding the duality of views, comprising on the one hand of a supernatural force and on the other hand a more ‘natural’ explanation, may be a good way of understanding these simultaneous pressures that govern many disaster responses by societies in the most economically underdeveloped parts of Africa or South America today. Indeed, some of the most extreme shocks and hazards do actually occur today in places with similarly high levels of religious or supernatural reverence.

3. Medieval economic history and disaster research: its contribution

So far it has been argued that one way in which the flagging fortunes of medieval economic history could be revived is to act almost a bridge between the humanities and the social sciences, which have in recent years drifted further apart. This could be achieved within the fertile setting of taking on ideas and methodologies from new social science disciplines such as Disaster Studies. Although one potential stumbling block may be the prevailing idea that medieval conceptions of hazard and shock response had very little in common with the ‘risk society’ that apparently governs modernity today, this paper has suggested that this idea has been forged on the back of privileging too much religious ideology and religious institutions in the pre-modern period. In the following section, two elements are discussed where medieval economic historians can make a real contribution to furthering our knowledge about how different societies dealt and deal with hazards and shocks in both the immediate aftermath and the long term.

A: The possibilities for spatial and chronological comparison

Comparative analysis, both spatially and chronologically, is the main tool we can employ for both description and explanation, and medievalists in particular know how to use such analytical tools to their maximum potential. Accordingly, medieval economic historians can also bring some of the benefits of the comparative method to the study of historical disasters – benefits which are specifically (or mainly) attributable to the almost ‘special’ laboratory of the Middle Ages.

Indeed, one element that medieval economic historians can benefit from is their capacity to offer up all kinds of different comparisons, made easier by the flexibility with which we move between dependent, independent and control variables. This is helped by the fact that one of the most devastating mortality crises, in the process completely shifting the balance between people and resources in very short space of time, occurred in the Middle Ages – that is of course the Black Death. The Black Death naturally offers up its own potential for comparative research, but also facilitates the creation of other comparative experiments focusing on other shocks and hazards that would be difficult to perform in other periods. By drastically changing the demographic regime of most European regions in a rapid movement, this offers a rupture point through which population pressure can be invoked as a significant control variable and a significant independent variable, when testing the coping capacity of different medieval societies. Thus, first of all, comparative research can be performed when holding population pressure on resources constant. Comparing the response of a number of different societies to

74 P. Schofield, ‘The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century,’ Economic History Review 61 (2008): 38-63; C. Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2009), 151-5, 190-3.


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Great Famine of 1315-17 makes sense when all societies are experiencing extremely high pressure on resources – perhaps even coming close to the natural Malthusian limits. Similarly comparing the response of different societies in the late 14th-century and 15th century also makes sense because it is very likely that population pressure is being held constant as a variable – although the Black Death did not exactly strike every region with the precise same intensity and chronology, in general its large demographic impact was widespread enough to mean that if one is comparing flooding or famine between a number of different societies in early 15th-century Europe, it will likely be between societies all experiencing a demographic regime of very low intensity.

In contrast, the devastating shock of the Black Death in the mid-14th century also allows the Middle Ages to be an excellent laboratory for testing the effects of population pressure on resources as an independent variable in societies’ capacity to cope with hazards and shocks. Indeed, it has often been suggested that famines such as the Great Famine of 1315-7 were so severe ultimately as a result of the strong pressure on finite amounts of resources that many European societies were experiencing at the time.75 Land morsellation and incessant fragmentation into tiny plots made the consequences of the Great Famine worse.76 And yet, this kind of hypothesis, though intuitively logical, has barely been subject to any kind of formal test. Those focusing on the Great Famine have tended to only approach the subject in isolation,77 likely on account of fascination with its overall extremity. What the Black Death allows medieval economic historians to do is compare dearth, harvest failure and famine responses of the same society, but under very different demographic regimes – because of course, famine in Europe did not begin or end with 1315-17, but continued intermittently through the Middle Ages into the early modern period and beyond.78 So, how did societies react to harvest failures in times of resource scarcity, and how did they react to harvest failure in times of resource plenty? Are there any differences in the mechanisms and institutions involved? Of course the comparison both pre- and post-Black Death with an explicit test on the impact of population pressure needs not be restricted to episodes of harvest failure but can also apply to other shocks such as floods and seismic activity.

Furthermore, one of the flaws in the current Disaster Studies literature is that it almost entirely concentrates on short-term impacts. This is understandable when most of the Disaster Studies scholars tend to focus on contemporary shocks and hazards, or at least those occurring in the 20th century – the historical record is simply not there to carry out time series analysis over long periods. So, for example, in a recent review by Dell et al. of economic literature on the impact of fluctuations in temperature, precipitation and storminess, only a few studies are mentioned which concentrate on the medium- or long-term impact of hazards and shocks beyond 5 or 10 years, and indeed, this is explicitly marked out as a major gap in the existing economic and institutional literature on disasters.79 One of the real advantages that medieval

75 M. Bailey, ‘Peasant Welfare in England, 1290-1348,’ Economic History Review 51 (1998): 223-51; P. Schofield, ‘Dearth, Debt and the Local Land Market in a Thirteenth-Century Village Community,’ Agricultural History Review 45 (1997): 1-17; R. Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIII siècle (Paris, 1968). 76 B. Campbell, ‘Factor Markets in England before the Black Death,’ Continuity and Change 24 (2009): 79-106. 77 Jordan, The Great Famine; I. Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315-1322,’ Past and Present 59 (1973): 3-50. Although recently the Great Famine has been assessed going backwards in time with climatic developments of the 11th and 12th centuries; W. Rosen, The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century (New York, 2014). 78 On the medieval and early modern chronology for Europe see G. Alfani & C. O Grada (eds), Famines in Premodern Europe, Eleventh-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, forthcoming 2016). 79 M. Dell, B. Jones & B. Olken, ‘What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature,’ Journal of Economic Literature 52.3 (2014): 778-80.


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economic historians then have is the actual richness of the historical record itself. Historians can stand back, free from thinking about the direct policy implications of their work, and give an important long-term perspective to changes in our economy and society that have been forged through sharp rupture points caused by hazards and shocks.80 As many medieval economic historians know, it takes the view of centuries, not decades, to observe more clearly the fundamental economic change in its true guise. Top economic historian Jan de Vries once claimed that ‘short-term climatic crises stand in relation to economic history as bank robberies to the history of banking’ – thereby diminishing the long-term structural impact of environmental catastrophes by highlighting its apparently random and insignificant nature.81 But as Mark Overton also once retorted, bank robberies can still be the proximate causes of changes in the banking system; structural responses which outstrip the actual economic effect of the individual bank robbery in question.82

And as medieval economic historians, we can help shift the emphasis of much contemporary Disaster Studies literature (focusing explicitly on the economic side) away from a reliance on abstract macro values such as GDP, when considering the ‘effectiveness’ or ‘quality’ of economic response to severe hazards and shocks. Indeed, partly because there are no real sources for GDP in our era (or rather its measurement will always be subject to a lack of exactitude),83 we are able to assert a number of other valuable indicators for long-term economic recovery of societies after terrible shocks and hazards – perhaps not the amount and diversity of indicators suggested in the recent OECD report or the kinds of Human Development Indexes established by Amartya Sen, but significant ones nonetheless. Path-breaking work on the effects of the Black Death has already shown what can be achieved with a little ingenuity when working with the sources: not only did the plague of the 14th century and its echo epidemics have strong consequences for other quantifiable indicators such as real wages,84 living standards,85 agricultural productivity,86 leisure time, diet,87 urbanization,88 and the functioning of governments,89 as well as more qualitative indicators such as ‘fear’,90 ‘social 80 G. Bankoff, ‘Time is of the Essence: Disasters, Vulnerability and History,’ International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 22 (2004): 23-42. 81 J. de Vries, ‘Measuring the Impact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate Methodologies,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1980): 603. 82 M. Overton, ‘Weather and Agricultural Change in England, 1660-1739,’ Agricultural History 63 (1989): 77. 83 Even the work for medieval England is based on a proxy from manorial accounts; Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth. 84 S. Pamuk, ‘The Black Death and the Origins of the ‘Great Divergence’ across Europe, 1300-1600,’ European Review of Economic History 11 (2007): 289-317; R. Allen, ‘The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices in the Middle Ages to the First World War,’ Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001): 411-47. 85 C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005) 86 R. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300-1800,’ European Review of Economic History 3 (2000): 1-25; B. Campbell, ‘Arable Productivity in Medieval England: Some Evidence from Norfolk,’ Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 379-404. 87 T. Soens and E. Thoen, ‘Vegetarians or Carnivores? Standards of Living and Diet in Late Medieval Flanders,’ in Le interazioni fra economia e ambiente biologico nell’Europa preindustriale. Secc. XIII-XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Florence, 2010), 495-527; M. Montanari, La faim et l’abondance. Histoire de l’alimentation en Europe (Paris, 1995), 104-9; C. Dyer, ‘Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Harvest Workers,’ Agricultural History Review 36 (1988): 21-37 88 N. Voigtländer and H-J. Voth, ‘The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,’ Review of Economic Studies 80 (2013): 774-811. 89 J.L. van Zanden, E. Buringh and M. Bosker, ‘The Rise and Decline of European Parliaments, 1188-1789,’ Economic History Review 65 (2012): 835-61. 90 S. Cohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002).


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cohesion’,91 and ‘freedom’,92 but these changes and effects were not distributed evenly over geographical regions of medieval Europe – even when two or more regions were confronted with broadly the same intensity and scale of initial shock. And furthermore, some of these changes in certain places were temporary or short-term in nature, while others creating lasting institutional, environmental, and cultural shifts.

It is clear that terrible environmental shocks and hazards do not just provide devastating amounts of damage to capital goods, the ruination of agricultural lands, or the death of human beings, and furthermore, do not merely stimulate or retard economies and societies on an aggregate level. Environmental shocks and hazards also have strong powers of redistribution, and we as medieval economic historians are in a good position to provide some long-term perspective to the issue of whether such short-term shocks can make societies more equal or unequal, and whether this is a structural change and made persistent over time. Understanding the mechanisms behind different societies’ paths to inequality has been made all the more pressing in recent times, as global inequality, as well as inequalities within countries themselves, is continuing to grow in the 21st century, and academic and non-academic interest in this subject can be seen in the international acclaim given to economic historian Thomas Piketty’s book, ‘Capital in the 21st Century’.93

However, despite this renewed interest in distribution in economics and economic history, our understanding of the long-term roots of economic inequality – going back into the pre-industrial period – is still very limited. This is down, first of all, to the lack of empirical research attempting to reconstruct distribution of resources (wealth, real estate or land) or income prior to the Industrial Revolution. Up until around 2007, most literature still tended to focus on inequalities forged from the 18th century onwards,94 as confirmed by the construction of an ‘inequality possibility frontier’ – a theoretical model tested on the back of just 8 data observations between the 14th and 18th centuries.95 Only very recently has there been a spate of works based on actual archival evidence to reconstruct long-term trends in inequality,96 yet

91 S. Cohn, ‘The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,’ Past and Present 196 (2007): 3-36; The Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge MA, 2006). 92 S. Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe,’ Economic History Review 60 (2007): 457-85. 93 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2014). 94 F. Alvaredo, A. Atkinson, T. Piketty & E. Saez, ‘The top 1 percent in international and historical perspective’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 27.3 (2013) 3-20; L. Prados de la Escosura, ‘Inequality and poverty in Latin America: a long-run exploration’, in T. Hatton, K. O’Rourke & A. Taylor (eds), The New Comparative Economic History (Cambridge MA 2007) 291-315; ‘Inequality, poverty and the Kuznets Curve in Spain, 1850-2000’, European Review of Economic History 12 (2008) 287-324; E. Frankema, Has Latin America always been unequal? A comparative study of assert and income inequality in the long twentieth century (Leiden 2009); ‘The colonial roots of land distribution: geography, factor endowments or institutions’, Economic History Review 63.2 (2010) 418-51; F. Alvaredo & E. Saez, ‘Income and wealth concentration in Spain from a historical and fiscal perspective’, Journal of the European Economic Association 7.5 (2009) 1140-67; C. Morrisson & W. Snyder, ‘The income inequality of France in historical perspective’, European Review of Economic History 4 (2000) 59-83; P. Lindert, ‘Three centuries of inequality in Britain and America’, in T. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (eds), Handbook of income distribution (Amsterdam 1999) ?. On the 18th century see C. Santiago-Caballero, ‘Income inequality in central Spain, 1690-1800’, Explorations in Economic History 48.1 (2011) 83-96; M. Cosgel & B. Ergene, ‘Inequality of wealth in the Ottoman Empire: War, weather and eighteenth-century Kastamonu’, Journal of Economic History 72.2 (2012) 308-31; A. McCants, ‘Inequality among the poor of eighteenth-century Amsterdam’, Explorations in Economic History 44.1 (2007) 1-21. 95 B. Milanovic, P. Lindert & J. Williamson, ‘Pre-industrial inequality’, The Economic Journal 121 (2011) 255-72. 96 J. Hanus, ‘Real inequality in the early modern Low Countries: the city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1500-1660’, Economic History Review 66 (2013) 733-56; B. van Bavel, ‘Rural development and landownership


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there is almost nothing from the medieval period, and that which has been produced, is not based on databases from extensive archival research but predictive modelling based on small samples, and once again, devoted to medieval England.97 Only one pioneering example for medieval reconstruction of inequality over the long term can be found in the major journals.98 Furthermore, those much older works able to reconstruct property or wealth distribution further back in time for the Middle Ages have generally only been able to do this for short time periods or single dates – often reliant on very exceptional or ‘special’ sources such as the Florentine Catasto of 1427.99 Thus, a debate on the establishment of a ‘Little Divergence’ across Europe at some point between the 14th and 18th centuries has been offered based on a wide range of indicators, and yet, inequality and distribution has been curiously absent from this scheme of research.

But second of all, the main overarching theoretical frameworks for why pre-industrial societies became more unequal have in recent times proven to be less convincing. The idea, based on the Kuznets Curve, that economic inequality in the pre-industrial period was inextricably linked to economic growth, and that this association between growth and inequality would only end with the incipient stages of modern industrialisation at a more advanced stage of economic maturity,100 has now been revised somewhat. Indeed, recent literature has also shown that pre-industrial inequality in the distribution of wealth and land could also take place in conditions of overall stagnation and even economic decline.101 What is being suggested now is that the roots of modern-day inequality may have very diverse causes, which diverged over time and space.102 Furthermore, this process was not one linear development from a

in Holland, c.1400-1650’, in O. Gelderblom (ed.), The political economy of the Dutch Republic (Farnham 2009) 167-96; G. Alfani, ‘Wealth inequalities and population dynamics in Northern Italy during the early modern period’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.4 (2010) 513-49; ‘The effects of plague on the distribution of property: Ivrea, Northern Italy, 1630’, Population Studies 64.1 (2010) 61-75; A. Pereira, J. Reis & A.M. Silva, ‘How unequal is Latin inequality? Five centuries of wage inequality, Portugal 1500-2000’, <http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Pereira_0.pdf>; H. Canbakal, ‘Comparative reflections on the distribution of wealth in Ayntab (17th-18th centuries)’, Oriens 37 (2009) 237-52; J. Fourie, ‘A history with evidence: income inequality in the Dutch Cape Colony’, Economic History of Developing Regions 26.1 (2011) 16-48; J. Fourie & D. von Fintel, ‘The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society: the case of the Cape Colony’, Cliometrica 4.3 (2010) 229-67. With an earlier summary of research in P. Hoffman, D. Jacks, P. Levin & P. Lindert, ‘Real inequality in Europe since 1500’, Journal of Economic History 62.2 (2002) 322-55. 97 C. Bekar & C. Reed, ‘Land markets and inequality: evidence from medieval England’, European Review of Economic History 17.3 (2013) 294-317 98 G. Alfani, ‘Economic inequality in Northwestern Italy: a long-term view (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries)’, Journal of Economic History (forthcoming 2015). 99 D. Herlihy & C. Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles. Une étude du Catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris 1978); D. Herlihy, ‘The distribution of wealth in a Renaissance community: Florence 1427‘, in P. Abrams & E.A. Wrigley (eds), Towns in societies. Essays in economic history and historical sociology (Cambridge 1978) 131-57; E. Conti, La formazione della struttura agrarian moderna nel Contado fiorentino. Parte 2a. Monografie e tavole statistiche (secoli X-XIX), vol. 3 (Rome 1965). 100 J.L. zan Zanden, ‘Tracing the beginning of the Kuznets Curve: Western Europe during the early modern period’, Economic History Review 48.4 (1995) 643-64. For the original works see S. Kuznets, ‘Economic growth and income inequality’, American Economic Review 45 (1955) 1-28. 101 Alfani, ‘Wealth inequalities’; ‘The effects of plague’; Pereira et al., ‘How unequal is Latin inequality?’; W. Ryckbosch, ‘Economic inequality and growth before the Industrial Revolution: a case study of the Low Countries (14th-19th centuries)’, Dondena Working Papers Series 67 (2014), <https://www.academia.edu/6892315/Economic_inequality_demography_and_growth_before_the_industrial_revolution_a_case_study_of_the_Low_Countries_14th-19th_Centuries_>. 102 D. Curtis, ‘Is there an ‘agro-town’ model for Southern Italy? Exploring the diverse roots and development of the agro-town structure through a comparative case study in Apulia’, Continuity & Change 28.3 (2013) 377-419.

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heightened state of economic equality to a state of economic inequality – it occurred in incipient stages, with greater intensity in some periods and places than in others, and in some cases the path towards inequality would retreat, perhaps be reversed over the short term, before switching back towards inequality again further down the line.

The fact that economic inequality in the pre-industrial period was not one consistent process, guided by one overarching development (such as economic growth), is perhaps revealing of the fact that short-term shocks (such as environmental hazards and calamities) could have a substantial redistributive impact for resources, property, and wealth, and furthermore, sometimes this could have lasting effects. Medieval economic historians are in a good position to contribute to our understanding of this process; in particular, by virtue of our heightened tendency to focus in on regional developments, we have an excellent opportunity to begin to tease out some of the precise causal mechanisms that give redistributive powers to one shock in one particular historical context, and yet a similar shock in another context having little redistributive powers, or instead, even the opposite kind of redistributive powers.103

Thus, for example, a number of medieval economic historians (in the same way as development economists of contemporary societies) have drawn a connection between overly burdened peasants, distress or panic land sales, and harvest failures and famines.104 Periods of dearth apparently helped consolidate the position of large landlords who could manipulate markets to the detriment of the poor peasant or agricultural labourer.105 Less clear, however, is the extent to which such pressures had persistent and long-lasting effects on the distribution of property within societies – were peasants able to regain either their original property or other sources of income once negotiating the initial hardships, or did this set into motion the first stages of land consolidation and large farm creation? Did famine, or rather fear or concern over the threat of famine, induce more urban or central governments in late-medieval Europe to invest in the rural property markets as way of securing a steady stream of provisioning from the hinterlands,106 or was it in fact the reverse – a weakening of urban investment patterns and a greater reliance on establishing more secure networks with long-distance provisioning sources?107 And how do these stories about the inequitable impact of subsistence crises in the Middle Ages square with other scholars emphasizing the capacity of the pre-industrial market to operate just as efficiently in times of crisis as during ‘normal’ times,108 or that the market helped increase flexibility of exchange and reallocation of resources from wider areas, stimulating investments in protection for the vulnerable?109

103 D. Curtis, ‘Danger and displacement in the Dollard: the 1509 flooding of the Dollard Sea (Groningen) and its impact on long-term inequality in the distribution of property’, Environment & History (forthcoming 2015). 104 B. Campbell, ‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in R. Smith (ed.), Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge 1984) 132; Schofield, ‘Dearth’; M. Davies & J. Kissock, ‘The feet of fines, the land market and the English agricultural crisis of 1315 to 1322’, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 215-30; Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine’, 37-41; Jordan, The Great Famine, 91; Campbell, ‘Factor markets’. Leading to a broad distinction between a set of ‘winners’ and a set of ‘losers’ from the events of 1315-7; Slavin, ‘Market failure’; B. Campbell, ‘The agrarian problem in the early 14th century’, Past & Present 188 (2005) 3-70. 105 P. Galloway, ‘Basic patterns in annual variations in fertility, nuptiality, mortality, and prices in pre-industrial Europe’, Population Studies 42 (1988) 277. 106 D. Curtis, ‘Florence and its hinterlands in the late Middle Ages: contrasting fortunes in the Tuscan countryside, 1300-1500’, Journal of Medieval History 38 (2012) 427-99. 107 G. Alfani, ‘The famine of the 1590s in Northern Italy. An analysis of the greatest system shock of the sixteenth century’, Histoire & Mesure 26.1 (2011) 17-49. 108 C. O Grada, Famine: a short history (Princeton NJ 2009); ‘Markets and famines in pre-industrial Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36.2 (2005) 143-66. 109 K.G. Persson, Grain markets in Europe, 1500-1900: integration and deregulation (Cambridge 1999).


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Elsewhere for other hazards and shocks, medieval floods have also been invoked as a way of bringing about strong changes in property relations – stimulating peasant property abandonment through the lack of capital buffers, or expropriation from the pressures of consolidating wealthy urban or elite investors,110 and yet such inequitable consequences were never inevitable as other recent literature has shown.111 Focus too can be given to the redistributive impact of epidemic shocks such as plague in the medieval period. Over 40 years ago now, David Herlihy once made the claim that the Black Death caused a greater equality in the distribution of resources in the short term – testament to the prevailing partible inheritance practices and splintering of property between sons.112 And yet over the medium- and long-term this gave way to greater inequality – testament to new conditions created in the land and housing market characterised by speculation and consolidation.113 In recent times, however, this interpretation has been turned on its head – showing how the Black Death in many parts of Northern and Central Italy led to the establishment of great equality in distribution of wealth and property over a number of centuries – only dissipating much later in the 16th century.114 Ultimately, the point is this – neither famine, flooding, nor the Black Death inevitably produced one particular redistributive trend. While plague led to land consolidation in some parts of Europe or the establishment of new social hierarchies within some communities, it led to the widespread access to land for previously disadvantaged social groups in other parts. Medieval economic historians are in a good position to contribute to debates on the long-term redistributive impact of hazards and shocks, in particular, because they are able to systematically take apart and compare a wide range of specific historical social contexts into which the redistributive effect of shocks and hazards are filtered. And given the recent calls for historians to rewrite the big-picture stories about climate change and inequality, medieval historians should have added incentive to use their skills and training to help shape these long-term arguments.

B: The possibilities to contextualise ‘big data’

‘Big data’ approaches to historical research have taken off in recent years, a trend which has found overwhelming support in the 2014 ‘History Manifesto’ as a potential platform for returning to ‘big questions’ and ‘longue durée’ approaches to the past.115 The digital age has enhanced our capacity in economic history to produce bigger datasets than ever before, with national and international research money being increasingly made available to develop large-scale data-infrastructure to produce more and more quantifiable figures and numbers for different indicators in historical societies. However, as noted in a recent retort to the ‘History Manifesto’, there has been far too much uncritical acceptance and trumpeting of the big data phenomenon, without careful understanding of its costs and benefits, opportunities and

; P. Perdue, ‘Official goals and local interests: water control in the Dongting Lake region during the Ming and Qing periods’, Journal of Asian Studies 41 (1982) 747-65; S. Borsch, ‘Environment and population: the collapse of large irrigation systems reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society & History 46 (2004) 451-68; T. Soens, ‘The social distribution of land and flood risk along the North Sea coast: Flanders, Holland, and Romney Marsh compared (c. 1200-1750)’, in Thoen & Van Bavel (eds), Rural societies and environments at risk, 141-73. 111 111 P. van Cruyningen, ‘From disaster to sustainability: floods, changing property relations and water management in the south-western Netherlands, c.1500-1800’, Continuity & Change 29 (2014) 250; Curtis, ‘Danger in the Dollard’. 112 D. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven 1967). 113 D. Herlihy, ‘Santa Maria Impruneta: a rural commune in the late Middle Ages’, in N. Rubinstein (ed.), Florentine studies (London 1968) 242-76. 114 Alfani, ‘Economic inequality’. 115 Guldi & Armitage, History manifesto.


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limitations.116 How do we quantify and put a figure on important concepts such as ‘hatred’ and ‘fear’ for historical societies, for example, and if we cannot put a figure on these concepts, does this mean that research funding, which is already seen to be supporting the big-data infrastructure, will not reach scholars focusing on these kinds of concepts? In any case, with explicit regard to historical disasters, much of this new quantifiable data now being uncovered is being produced in interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary teams, often not by historians themselves but by teams of economists, paleo-climatologists, biologists, or bio-archaeologists. Some of this data is extremely valuable, but what is argued in the following section is that medieval historians still have an important role in adding further value (and caution) to the figures by reconsidering the sources being used to compile such data and by assessing these numbers within very specific historical social contexts.

One good example of this process in action can be found in the new exciting scientific research being performed on historical diseases, in particular plague. Medieval economic historians can get inspiration from the ways in which social and cultural historians of the Middle Ages have continued to make their disciplines relevant. Much of this is not on ‘big data’ per se, but instead new laboratory-led approaches to uncovering new data about the past. Indeed, ground-breaking scientific research in the past decade or so using whole genome sequencing procedures have brought us to the conclusion that Yersinia pestis was the culpable causal agent for both medieval and early modern plagues of the 2nd Pandemic, and for plagues of the late 18th- and 19th centuries that hit places such as India and China in the 3rd Pandemic.117 Many of these papers produced by micro-biologists and bio-archaeologists are very forthright in confidently asserting this fact with titles such as ‘Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death’ and ‘Genome sequence of Yersinia pestis: the causative agent of plague’. The significance of these very recent findings is that they should be considered in the context of a long and often heated argument over whether Black Death was actually ‘plague’ or some other disease – an number of alternatives over the years have been offered such as anthrax, forms of Ebola, or mistaken identity for typhus.118 For the scientists producing these remarkable results then, this evidence should end the discussion once and for all.

And yet, what medieval historians are now doing, inspired predominantly by the work of Samuel Cohn, is to use their expertise with different forms of historical evidence to open up new problems and questions for microbiologists, geneticists, and others in the scientific community. Historians are able to inspire, redirect and stimulate cutting edge research produced in the laboratories.119 Indeed, even with scientific evidence in hand, historians have still challenged some of the recent findings. Cohn, for example, has argued that while DNA evidence points to Yersinia pestis as the causative pathogen, this brings up new exciting and curious questions which remain unanswered such as why the plagues of the 3rd Pandemic

116 D. Cohen & P. Mandler, ‘The History Manifesto: a critique’, American Historical Review 120.2 (2015) 541. 117 K. Bos et al., ‘A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death’, Nature 478 (2011) 506-10; V. Schuenemann et al., ‘Targeted enrichment of ancient pathogens yielding the pPCP1 plasmid of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death’, PNAS 108 (2011) E746-52; S. Haensch et al., ‘Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death’, PLoS Pathogens 6 (2010) e1001134; T. Tran et al., ‘High throughput, multiplexed pathogen detection authenticates plague waves in medieval Venice, Italy’, PLoS One 6 (2011) PMID21423736; M. Drancourt & D. Raoult, ‘Molecular insight into the history of plague’, Microbes & Infection 4 (2002) 105-9; J. Parkhill et al., ‘Genome sequence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague’, Nature 413 (2001) 523-7. 118 The link between Yersinia pestis and the Black Death doubted in S. Cohn, ‘The Black Death: end of a paradigm’, AHR 107 (2002) 703-38; G. Twigg, The Black Death: a biological reappraisal (London 1984); C. Duncan & S. Scott, Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations (Cambridge 2001); J. Shrewsbury, A history of bubonic plague in the British Isles (London 1970). 119 L. Little, ‘Plague historians in lab coats’, P&P 213 (2011) 267-90.


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exhibited features quite different to the plagues of the 2nd Pandemic – the more recent one of the late 18th- and 19 centuries being less quick to spread across areas, less severe (with regard to mortality rates), and offering different seasonality of mortality and no kind of human developmental resistance, in contrast to the earlier one.120 The questions go on. For example, how does the transmission of the Yersinia pestis pathogen to humans via the bites of fleas feeding on infected rodent hosts (the interpretation favoured by those promoting the Yersinia pestis genome evidence) is able to square with plague epidemiology of the 14th-17th centuries, where infection spread so quickly and to the most isolated communities? Why, if the rat and flea were so important in causing and spreading this epidemic disease, did contemporaries barely mention rats and fleas in the literature? In the meantime, other scholars are suggesting that the rapidity of spread may be accounted for via human to human transmission via an insect vector such as the human flea.121 And historical evidence on contagion patterns is helping support this idea that plague was likely passed between humans too,122 and that is without considering the prevalence of the pneumonic form of plague spread airborne via coughing and sneezing. Medieval historians are showing that one of the distinguishing features of the plague vis-à-vis other diseases may have been its exceptional contagiousness, and it is clear from historical evidence that late-medieval and early modern societies had become preoccupied with isolation of the afflicted. As summarised recently, however, not all these different factors necessarily discounts the other: the aetiological cause of the Black Death still can be Yersinia pestis, wild rodents and their fleas can still preserve the disease in its epizootic state, and bubonic plague can still spread quickly because the main vectors between humans were the human flea and louse – ‘because of the efficacy of large numbers of vectors, as much as the virulence of the strain or strains, death rates could be very high’.123

Ultimately, historians are now showing that despite advances in our knowledge about the association of Yersinia pestis and the Black Death, this information in isolation will not allow us to solve the riddle of one causative pathogen but very sharply divergent epidemiological regimes – not only between the 2nd and 3rd Pandemics, but within geographical regions afflicted by the 2nd Pandemic itself.124 And while scientists have suggested that Yersinia pestis bacteria had abilities to supress and avoid normal immune system responses such as phagocytosis and antibody production,125 historians are now showing evidence to suggest that humans during the late Middle Ages were at this time still able to somehow display higher and differential resistance to the disease.126 New fascinating questions are now being posed, often by interdisciplinary teams including historians, on the issue of immunity: whether the virulence and severity of the 1347-52 bout was due to hitting societies with no chance to build up immunity (compared to later bouts), or whether the high levels of stress on human populations in the late 13th- and early 14th centuries leading up to the initial plague played a 120 S. Cohn, ‘Epidemiology of the Black Death and successive waves of plague’, Medical Hist. 27 (2008) 74-100. 121 L. Walløe, ‘Medieval and modern bubonic plague: some clinical continuities’, Medical Hist. 27 (2008) 71. 122 S. Cohn & G. Alfani, ‘Households and plague in early modern Italy’, JIH 38 (2007) 177-205. 123 J. Bolton, ‘Looking for Yersinia pestis: scientists, historians and the Black Death’, in L. Clark & C. Rawcliffe (ed.), The Fifteenth Century XII: society in an age of plague (Woodbridge 2013) 31. 124 A. Carmichael, ‘Plague persistence in Western Europe: a hypothesis’, The Medieval Globe 1 (2014) 157-9; E. Eckert, The structure of plagues and pestilences in early modern Europe: Central Europe 1560-1640 (Basel 1996); G. Alfani, ‘Plague in seventeenth-century Europe and the decline of Italy: an epidemiological hypothesis’, EREH 17 (2013) 408-30. 125 G. Viboud & Bliska, J., ‘Yersinia outer proteins: role in modulation of host cell signalling responses and pathogenesis’, Annual Rev. Microbiology 59 (2005) 69-89; M. de la Puerta et al., ‘Charactrerization of new substrates targeted by Yersinia tyrosine phosphatase YopH’, PLoS ONE 4 (2009) e4431. 126 Cohn, ‘Epidemiology’; The Black Death transformed: disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe (London 2002) 192-202.


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role?127 Some scholars have suggested that societies feasibly carried greater immunity from greater exposure to the microbial regimes over time, while others arguing for an inherent resistance based on other environmental, dietary and economic factors.128 The astounding advances in bio-archaeological techniques are now being put to effective use, asking whether certain bouts of plague affected women more than men, children more than the middle-aged or elderly, or those with poor health more than the healthy.129 Ultimately, medieval historians using ‘traditional’ forms of evidence, with trained eyes for careful source criticism, are shaping and will continue to shape important scientific research on diseases of the past, that have exceptional relevance for disease regimes of the present and future – particularly given contemporary concerns over terrorism and the potential harnessing of bacteria as weapons.

Another aspect of disaster studies research that medieval economic historians can profitably contribute to is on the historical climate. Alongside the development of inequality, climate change was earmarked in the ‘History Manifesto’ as one of the main areas in which historians can help build a convincing long-term narrative.130 Indeed, historians are increasingly being included as part of international and multi-disciplinary teams of paleo-climatologists, in particular for the crucial 1000-1750 CE period, before the advent of instrumental data. Most interest lies in the compilation of massive datasets such as those produced and published on ‘Euroclimhist’ or ‘tambora.org’, the statistical production of clear and reliable signals out of huge numbers of individual series, but medieval historians are in a good position with their training in source criticism to bring out some of the flaws in this process. So just to focus in on one example, scholars in recent years have tried to reconstruct the frequency and levels of storms impacting upon the North Sea coast line from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century,131 employing the same kinds of data that has been produced on historical climatology projects such as the tamborg.org, and looking to see how they correlate with the large databases of flooding we now have for certain parts of the North Sea area. Yet the problem with these reconstructions is that they are not based on actual data for storm surges per se, but what has ‘perceived to have been’ a storm by contemporary commentators, often in chronicles. It is clear that these commentators would have been more likely to actually only refer to and document those storms which caused some form of damage or impeded or inflicted upon human beings in some way. Ultimately it is impossible to separate from their

127 P. Slavin, ‘The Great Bovine Pestilence and its consequences in England and Wales, 1318-50’, EcHR 65 (2012) 1263; S. DeWitte & P. Slavin, ‘Between famine and death: England on the eve of the Black Death: evidence from paleoepidemiology and manorial accounts’, JIH 44 (2013) 37-60; S. DeWitte, ‘Setting the stage for medieval plague: pre-Black Death trends in survival and mortality’, Amer. J. Physical Anthropology EV (2015). 128 F. Crespo & M. Lawrenz, ‘Heterogeneous immunological landscape and medieval plague: an invitation to a new dialogue between historians and immunologists’, The Medieval Globe 1 (2014) 229-57. 129 S. DeWitte, ‘The effect of sex on risk of mortality during the Black Death in London AD 1349-1350’, Amer. J. Physical Anthropology 139 (2009) 222-34; ‘Age patterns of mortality during the Black Death in London AD 1349-1350’, J. Arch. Science 37 (2010) 3394-400; S. DeWitte & J. Wood, ‘Selectivity of the Black Death with respect to pre-existing health’, PNAS 105 (2008) 1436-41; S. DeWitte & G. Hughes-Morey, ‘Stature and frailty during the Black Death: the effect of stature on risks of epidemic mortality in London AD 1348-1350’, J. Arch. Science 39 (2012) 1412-9; S. Kacki et al., ‘Black Death in the rural cemetery of Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, Aude-Languedoc, Southern France, 14th century: immunological evidence’, J. Arch. Science 38 (2011) 571-7. 130 Guldi & Armitage, History manifesto. 131 A. de Kraker, ‘Storminess in the Low Countries, 1350-1725’, Environment & History 19 (2013) 149-72; H. Lamb & K. Fryendahl, Historic storms of the North Sea, British Isles, and Northwest Europe (Cambridge 1991); J. Buisman, Duizend jaar weer, wind en water in de Lage Landen (Franeker 1995-2006).


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view, an assessment of storm occurrence and the impact it had for societies.132 And so despite their entry in climate data forums such as the tambora.org (whose goal is to reconstruct climatic trends from all ‘man-made’ sources), we still do not know whether levels of historical storminess over time was actually differing variations in storms per se, or instead variations in the capacity for certain societies to deal with storms. The flaws in this data can be further highlighted by turning to criticism of the medieval sources: many of the so-called storms and resultant ‘flood disasters’ referred to by chroniclers, particularly in the medieval period, turned out to be over-exaggerations, suffered from severe imprecision in timing and geography, or were even complete myths.133 In fact reliance on these kinds of sources has led to an over-estimation of the frequency and intensity of medieval floods in comparison to the 16th- and 17th centuries, when browsing through some of the regional gazetteers.134 What medieval historians can do for ‘big data’ datasets produced in the field of historical climatology, is provide assurances and caution about the types and use of documentary sources – especially in light of the increasingly popularity of digital databases such as tambora.org.

Furthermore, most climate scientists are hardly interested in the inconclusive contextualization of possible climate signals, and the question why climate played a significant role in a particular context. What many historical climatologists have failed to realise, or rather care enough about, is that similar or even the same climatic changes have very different meanings, impact and consequences between different historical societies. Although recent books such as Geoffrey Parker’s on the 17th-century ‘crisis’ have perpetuated a view, based on the cherry-picking of supportive cases, that phenomena such as the Little Ice Age created disruption on a global scale,135 regardless of where and how one lived, it is clear that climatic instability and the potential environmental hazards that ensued were not the same everywhere. Careful comparison of data on prices and mortalities would show us that even in regions very close together, harvest failures such as that of the early 1690s did not produce equivalent effects.136 The consolidation of all this new data on the climate, in some cases going back into the Middle Ages, is a positive development – but the challenge for medieval historians now is to take some of these state-of-the-art datasets on, for example, historical grape harvests, and assess what they meant for specific historical societies. Big data can of course allow us to create ever larger narratives talking about ever longer time spans, but this should be combined with formal comparative testing at the other end of the small scale too.

4. Conclusion

This paper has identified two main changes in the way mainstream economic history is conducted nowadays – the greater reliance and prevalence of econometrics and the move towards the ‘big data’ phenomenon in the digital age. This has had knock-on effects for the discipline of medieval economic history, apparently less suited to these methods, and at present it would be fair to say that medieval economic history is not in the best state. The main argument of the paper is that to reinvigorate the discipline, medieval historians would do best to take less precedence on the archive, and more on developing analytical approaches

132 T. Soens, ‘Flood Disasters and Agrarian Capitalism: An Environmental Kuznets Curve?’ (unpublished paper, The Impact of Disasters of Pre-Modern Economies Workshop, Munster 2014) 6-7. 133 O. Knottnerus, ‘Dollardgeschiedenis(sen) – mythe en realiteit,‘ in K. Essink (red.), Stormvloed 1509 – geschiedenis van de Dollard (Groningen, 2013), 95-116. 134 For example; M. Gottschalk (ed.), Stormvloeden en overstromingen in Nederland, 500-1700, 3 vols. (Assen, 1971-7); M. Bailey, ‘Per Impetum Maris: Natural Disaster and Economic Decline in Eastern England, 1275-1350,’ B. Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: Essays in the Crisis of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester, 1991), 191-9. 135 Parker, Global Crisis. 136 See for example C. O Grada & J.M. Chevet, ‘Famine and market in Ancien Régime France’, Journal of Economic History 62.3 (2002) 706-33.


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and interacting with theories, ideas and hypotheses developed in other social science fields. In fact, a relevant function of medieval economic history could and should be to empirically test hypotheses and assertions made by other social sciences such as sociology and economics, and even by natural scientists such as biology.

One potential forum through which medieval economic history could stimulate itself is through closer interaction with the new burgeoning discipline of ‘Disaster Studies’. Although ‘Disaster Studies’ ideas have filtered on through to a number of other social science disciplines, however, very little has reached historians. First of all, we suggest that this is due to the shift of history away from the other social sciences in recent years, but also secondly, on emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Anthropocene and how the modern age has little in common with the medieval. We suggest that this has been exacerbated by the over-privileging by cultural historians of the religious and ‘supernatural’ responses to terrible shocks and hazards, without recognition that (a) medieval people did not merely accept any imposed religious disaster discourse, (b) religious or spiritual responses to hazards and shocks did not preclude other coping mechanisms, and (c) even today terrible shocks and hazards occur in highly religious cultural settings. We suggest that the specific contribution that medieval economic historians could make is two-fold. First of all, by offering up new possibilities for spatial and longitudinal comparisons, either through the flexible manoeuvring of dependent, independent and control variables or through offering a much needed long-term perspective (on important developments such as the roots of inequality). Second of all, by acting as a place to contextualise large datasets, often produced by those outside the historical discipline in the era of big-data. Medieval economic historians can learn from their colleagues in social and cultural history about using their expertise to redirect and shape scientific research (such as in the study of historical diseases), and furthermore, use their own training to provide much needed source criticism and contextual background to forge new narratives based on the pool of historical climatological data now being uncovered.

As a final point, we should perhaps be more confident in asserting the relevance of the medieval period as a source of inspiration for policy-making today, especially when looking for unconventional solutions. Next to the pronounced regional variations in coping mechanisms, the combination of global capitalism and state power, has exercised a kind of uniform influence. Something that became very apparent in the 18th and 19th centuries was a powerful centralization of response to hazards and shocks, a turn to the technocratic solutions (often energy and capital intensive), standard procedures of relief and solidarity, a disrespect for regional variation, and a stronger belief in the absolute control of risk (with Beck’s risk society as a historical epoch). Some of this predates the 18th century, but it becomes more generalized in line with the Industrial Revolution. Only in the last decade, in the epoch of climate change, have policy makers and environmental scientists realised that these solutions do not always work, and are looking for alternatives. Out of any period in European history, the medieval period has alternative solutions, which were through time disregarded as antiquated, dysfunctional, and not able to guarantee absolute protection. But when admitting that absolute protection is maybe not possible, these solutions could inspire policy again. Only in recent years are we becoming aware of how the ways in which medieval peasant communities dealt with flood plains could offer inspiration for coastal realignment policies for example.

Acknowledgements: Daniel R. Curtis is a postdoctoral researcher on an ERC project led by Prof. Bas van

Bavel at Utrecht University under the name ‘Coordinating for Life’ (grant no. 339647). He is beginning a new project at Leiden University funded by the NWO under the name ‘Why Do some Epidemics Lead to Hatred?’ (grant no. 275-53-014). Tim Soens was a Senior Researcher on the ERC project and is now Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp.

the shock to reinvigorate medieval economic history? version for this onference use only. do not...

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