A critical appraisal of the influence exerted by Malthusian explanations of crisis in the early fourteenth century in the work of Michael Postan and Georges Duby.

These papers are taken from the first of a series of five international conferences devoted to the European conjuncture in 1300. They examine the enduring influence of Michael Postan’s Malthusian model of economic crisis, and in particular the impact upon non-English speaking historians of Postan’s ideas as interpreted by Georges Duby. Through both historiographical essays and original research, the authors reinterpret the later medieval crisis on the continent and in Britain. The vision they express is of a medieval society in which economic, political, and social threads wove together town and country in a complex web extending to the furthest reaches of the ‘margin’, in the highlands of the Mediterranean and on the heaths of England. In order to understand the later medieval crisis, our attention must shift to how individuals negotiated and manoeuvred among institutions of exchange, power, and culture in their bewildering complexity rather than focus upon the modelling of reified factors.

Table des matières :

John Drendel – Introduction

Richard Britnell – Commercialization, Stagnation, and Crisis, 1250–1350
Christopher Dyer – Medieval Small Towns and the Late Medieval Crisis
John Langdon – The Long Thirteenth Century: An Era of Schumpeterian Growth?
Phillipp Schofield – M. M. Postan and the Peasant Economy
Anne Dewindt – Historians and Peasant Agency: Studies of Late Medieval English Peasants
John Munro – ‘Money Matters’: A Critique of the Postan Thesis on Medieval Population, Prices, and Wages
Erik Thoen and Tim Soens – The Family or the Farm: A Sophie’s Choice? The Late Medieval Crisis in Flanders —
Thierry Pécout – Le destin heuristique d’une histoire de la panique. La Crise en Provence au Moyen Âge finissant: Jalons historiographiques pour le XIVe siècle
Monique Bourin – De nouveaux chemins de développement dans le Languedoc　d’avant la peste
Philippe Bernardi – Quand le bâtiment va … Une facette des rapports ville-campagne: Le Marché des matériaux
Francine Michaud – Réflexions sur la condition des travailleurs au cours du XIVe siècle à Marseille
Laure Verdon – Les capbreus royaux roussillonnais et la crise malthusienne
Constance H. Berman – Cistercian Agriculture in Female Houses of Northern France, 1200–1300

Informations pratiques :
John Drendel (ed.), Crisis in the Later Middle Ages. Beyond the Postan–Duby Paradigm, Turnhout, Brepols, 2015 (The Medieval Countryside, 13). XII+368 p., 10 b/w ill., 23 b/w tables, 1 b/w line art, 156 x 234 mm. ISBN: 978-2-503-54742-8. Prix : 90 euros.

Source : Brepols