Call for Papers for a panel proposal to the network Family and Demography of the European Social Science History Conference Lyon 21-24 April 2027

Organizer: Albert Reixach Sala (University of Lleida)

Chair: Pere Benito i Monclús (University of Lleida)

Organized within the project MORTALITASMortality crises in the Northwestern Mediterranean, 11th-16th centuries: Narrative memory, serial records and the construction of sociodemographic indexes (PID2023-151785NB-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

This panel proposal examines the sociodemographic consequences of mortality crises during the Late Middle Ages, with particular attention to their impact on family structures and strategies. Although such crises stemmed primarily from epidemic disease, they were also associated with comparatively less lethal but still disruptive phenomena, including famine, warfare, and certain natural disasters.

The chronological focus centres on the early phase of the second pandemic, with the Black Death of 1347–1351 conventionally regarded as a major watershed. However, the panel does not treat this event as the sole analytical benchmark. Rather, it seeks to reassess—and where appropriate, to decentre—interpretative frameworks shaped by the dominant narrative of the mid-fourteenth-century pandemic, which have often overshadowed subsequent cycles of plague and other epidemic outbreaks extending into the later sixteenth century. Geographically, the panel privileges Southern and Mediterranean Europe in a broad sense. For the premodern period in particular, this region presents a notable historiographical paradox: while scholars acknowledge patterns that diverge in important respects from those of the North Atlantic area, the considerable potential of surviving sources—often available for relatively early chronologies—remains insufficiently exploited.

The proposed session has three main objectives. 1) to identify and assess written sources that provide direct evidence of extraordinary mortality—such as burial registers—as well as more indirect documentation, including series of wills, and to examine their possibilities and limitations for reconstructing demographic change. 2) to bring together case studies from different territories, encompassing both urban and rural communities, that combine these materials with other types of documentation, such as fiscal records, in order to reconstruct the demographic contexts in which peaks of abnormal mortality occurred and to evaluate their effects. These effects may include a decline in the number of potential and current descendants—particularly where mortality disproportionately affected children or subadults—an increase in widowhood, and, at least temporarily, a reduction in average household size. Such transformations were not irreversible: they could be mitigated or reshaped in few years through demographic adjustments and external dynamics, including migration. 3) to analyse changing family configurations in relation to successive epidemic waves and other mortality crises, contributing to a broader understanding of social resilience and demographic adaptation in late medieval Mediterranean Europe. This also entails taking into account women’s agency in all these transformations and the possible connections with marriage patterns.

We invite papers that address one or more of these heuristic and methodological challenges, or that contribute new data and reflections based on case studies of varying scale, while engaging substantively with central debates in premodern economic and social history.

Anyone interested may send us a paper proposal including a title and a 100-word abstract

Contact and email for paper proposal submission: albert.reixach@udl.cat

Deadline for paper proposal submission: 8 April 2026