After the Black Death

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Catastrophic Event ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
New Research ◽  
Main Effects ◽  
North Western

The Black Death of 1348–9 is the most catastrophic event in recorded history, and this study—the Ford Lectures of 2019 at Oxford University—offers a major re-evaluation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. It draws upon recent inter-disciplinary research into climate and disease; renewed interest among econometricians in the origins of the Little Divergence, whereby economic performance in parts of north-western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent on the pathway to modernity; a close re-reading of case studies of fourteenth-century England; and original new research into manorial and governmental sources. The Black Death is placed within the wider contexts of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of the law in reducing risk and shaping behaviour. The government’s response to the crisis is re-considered to suggest an innovative re-interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By 1400 the main effects of plague had worked through the economy and society, and their implications for England’s future precocity are analysed. This study rescues the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox between plague and revolt, and elevates it to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.

Seal-Hunting in the Stone Age of North-Western Europe: A Study in Economic Prehistory

1946 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 12-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Patient Identification ◽  
Vital Interest ◽  
Life Habits ◽  
Physiological Approach ◽  
North Western

Although it has been widely recognised that the bones of seals occur on Stone Age sites in various parts of north-western Europe, no comprehensive attempt to clarify the history and estimate the role of seal-hunting in the economy of Stone Age Europe has yet been made. The research, on which the present paper is based, is part of a programme to further knowledge of prehistoric times by the study of social activities. Seal-hunting is here considered, not because it gave rise to objects which need classifying and dating, but simply because it was an activity of vital interest to certain coast-dwelling communities in north-western Europe during the Stone Age. If the physiological approach is stressed, this is not to depreciate the morphological: in point of fact the more we discover about any human activity the more fitted we become to interpret correctly the material objects or structures associated with it.Archaeology is rarely sufficient to recover the way of life of early man. The problem of seal-hunting in antiquity, which is after all basically biological, is one of those which can only be resolved by several convergent disciplines. The foundations of the present study have been laid by zoologists, men who, like Winge, Holmquist, Pira, Degerböl and others, have given us precise information about the seals hunted by early man, through patient identification of bones and teeth from archaeological deposits, or who, by their observation of the life habits and distribution of the various species in the field, have, like Collett, Nordqvist, Nansen and Fraser Darling, enabled us to visualise the opportunities open to the old hunters.

scholarly journals Placing the Blame for Covid-19 in and on Ultra-Orthodox Communities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander L Gilman
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Group Actions ◽  
Black Death ◽  
False Accusation

Abstract The new coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, has resurrected a number of historical and sociological problems associated with blaming collectives for the origin or transmission of infectious disease. The default example of the false accusation has been the case of the fourteenth century charge of well poisoning against the Jews of Western Europe causing the pandemic of the Black Death. Yet querying group actions in times of pandemics is not solely one of rebutting false attributions. What happens when a collective is at fault and how does the collective respond to the simultaneous burden of both false, stereotypical accusations and appropriate charges of culpability? The case study here is of Haredi communities and the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19.

scholarly journals Labour Ideologies and Women in the Northern Netherlands, c.1500–1800

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (S19) ◽  
pp. 45-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariadne Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Time Perceptions ◽  
North Western

SummaryThe ideology of domesticity that identified women with a domestic role became more articulated in north-western Europe throughout the early modern period. At the same time, perceptions of work changed and a new appraisal of labour emerged. These seemingly contradictory tendencies prompt the question how women fitted in with the ideology of work. This article discusses common notions of the economic role of women as they emerged from the debates on women, gender relations, and work; how these notions were translated into practical advice in conduct literature; and with what norms women were confronted in everyday life. It appears that work was valued positively for both women and men. Women's involvement in remunerated work was not considered problematic. There was a dividing line, however, and that was drawn between work within the home, which was deemed women's work, and work outside the home, which was deemed men's work. In practice, a differentiation was made between social groups; women who lacked income from capital were supposed to earn their living from work.

THE TRACERY-CARVED, CLAMP-FRONTED MEDIEVAL CHEST AT ST MARY MAGDALEN CHURCH, OXFORD, IN A COMPARATIVE NORTH-WEST EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

2014 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Pickvance
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Future Research ◽  
European Perspective ◽  
North West ◽  
Recent Suggestion ◽  
Mary Magdalen ◽  
North Germany ◽  
North Western ◽  
West European

The St Mary Magdalen chest is striking because of its carved facade and has attracted the attention of historians over the last century. There has been debate about its age, culminating in the recent suggestion that it either dates to the fourteenth century or is a later copy. This paper makes a detailed study of all the elements of the chest, constructional and decorative, and compares them with features of related medieval chests in England and Continental north-western Europe. It concludes that the chest has gone through a major reconstruction involving replaced front stiles but that it shares at least four features with chests in north Germany and Sweden dating from around 1320–30 that are not found in English chests, suggesting that it is an imported chest or was made by craftsmen working in that tradition. Numerous areas for future research into the features of English and Continental medieval chests are identified.

The Four Black Deaths

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (5) ◽  
pp. 1601-1631
Author(s):  
Monica H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Causative Organism ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Big Bang

Abstract The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 c.e. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic evidence, I trace the bacterial descendants of the Big Bang proliferation, comparing that data to historical human activities in and around the area of plague’s emergence. The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.

Family, kinship and welfare provision in Europe, past and present: commonalities and divergences

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIER PAOLO VIAZZO
Keyword(s):  
Regional Differences ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Relative Weight ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
North Western ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTThe realization that European family forms are failing to converge as predicted by modernization theory has led many scholars to suspect that the broad regional differences detected by historians persist in the present and are likely to influence future developments. This article outlines some relevant hypotheses prompted by historical studies about the role of family and kinship as sources of social security and analyses the results of comparative work on contemporary Europe, paying special attention to the relative weight of cultural and structural factors. Although differences still appear to predominate over commonalities, it is not inconceivable that in certain important respects European countries might paradoxically converge, owing to the generalized decline of the welfare state, towards forms of welfare provision that are closer to the ‘familialistic’ models of southern and eastern Europe than to the ‘modern’ models of Scandinavia and north-western Europe.

scholarly journals De rol van de Schelde in het Romeins transportsysteem (50 v.Chr. – 410 n. Chr.)

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Toon Bongers
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Transport Network ◽  
Single System ◽  
Inland Waterways ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
North Western ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Integrated Transport Network

Archaeological sources make it impossible to deny that rivers served as pathways in the past. Conversely, the role of inland waterways in the Roman transport economy of northern Gaul has received little scholarly attention. This paper introduces a historical archaeological study of the transport network of the Roman-era Scheldt basin (presentday north-western Europe), with an emphasis on the role of waterways. As a starting point, this study works from the hypothesis of an integrated transport network, in which rivers, roads, and seaways link up to form a single system.

scholarly journals Feeding inequalities: the role of economic inequalities and the urban market in late medieval food security. The case of fourteenth-century Ghent

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-428
Author(s):  
Stef Espeel ◽  
Sam Geens
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Market ◽  
Medieval Food ◽  
Access To Food

Although the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) revised their theoretical model of food security for over two decades ago, historians have been slow in adopting these new insights to study pre-modern societies. Showcasing the potential of the holistic approach proposed by the FAO, this paper analyses the evolution of food security in the calamitous fourteenth century in Ghent, one the most populated cities at that time. In the long-term, access to food seem to have bettered during the second half of the century thanks to increased wages, wealth and investments into farmland. While these gains can partly be linked to demographic evolutions, we found no evidence of an often-hypothesized Malthusian ceiling before the Black Death.

scholarly journals ‘Quod grata lavacra nitescunt’: Roman Villa Baths as Markers of Elite Competition in Continental North-Western Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sadi Maréchal
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Roman Villa ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
North Western

This article examines how villa baths in the north-western Roman empire can help us understand how rural regions were incorporated in the Roman cultural sphere despite the absence of cities and secondary agglomerations. Whereas in the first phase of Roman rule the addition of private baths to a villa could be interpreted as a marker of a Roman way of life, the ever larger and more luxurious bathhouses of the second and third centuries ad can only be understood in the context of intra-elite competition, revealing a real concern for displaying wealth and underlining social status, but also for leaving a family legacy. Here, a case-study in the rural north-west examines the role of baths in the self-representation of elites, the consolidation of elite peer interaction networks, the creation of social exclusion, and the inclusion of new ideas into local cultures.

The Role of Positive and Negative Affectivity in Healthy and Unhealthy Work-Related Behavior and Experiences

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Hofmann ◽  
Carl-Walter Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Negative Affectivity ◽  
Coping Behavior ◽  
Common Method ◽  
Positive Affectivity ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Teacher Students ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Main Effects ◽  
Positive And Negative Affectivity

Abstract. Positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA) are basic traits that affect work-related perceptions and behaviors and should be considered in any assessment of these variables. A quite common method to assess healthy or unhealthy types of work-related perceptions and behaviors is the questionnaire on Work-Related Coping Behavior and Experience Patterns (WCEP). However, the association of PA and NA with WCEP remained unclear. In a sample of teachers, physiotherapists, and teacher students ( N = 745; Mage = 35.07, SD = 12.49; 78% females), we aimed to identify the relevance of these basic traits. After controlling for age, gender, and type of occupation, we found main effects of PA and NA, with the specific combination of PA and NA being decisive for predicting the assignment to a WCEP type. The results highlight the need to include PA and NA in future assessments with the WCEP questionnaire.

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