By now it is received doctrine of long standing that the economies of northwestern Europe were repeatedly held in check by diminishing returns in the Middle Ages. Much of this argument has been focused on the course of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This period is commonly pictured as the most dramatic example of the normal tendency for population growth to place increasingly severe pressure on the resource base. The evidence most frequently offered to support this thesis for the fourteenth century is the substantial decline in population to which the Black Death is believed to be a dramatic, but by no means exclusive, contributor. This is not to say that it has been generally believed that no growth occurred in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, many proponents of this view stress that there were lengthy subperiods within the era in which both per capita income and population increased. It is held that ultimately such gains were reversed and pushed back to the level of subsistence, however. The dominant force is seen to be diminishing returns à la Malthus in that population always continued to increase until eventually—intermittent growth notwithstanding—it spread the available nonhuman resources so thinly across the population that further increase in its size was impossible. Probably the best known spokesman for this thesis is Professor M. M. Postan. He has spent a good part of his distinguished career constructing the conceptual model and assembling the historical evidence to substantiate the hypothesis. The essentials of his position are supported by the other widely recognized commentators on the question-Georges Duby, N. J. G. Pounds, Sylvia L. Thrupp, J. Z. Titow, and B. H. Slicher Van Bath. Recently the view has been given a modern, formal specification in the works of Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas and that of Ronald Lee. In recent years some of the components of this explanation have been challenged by scholars such as Barbara Harvey, John Hatcher, Mavis Mate, N. J. Mayhew, and D. G. Watts. The traditional view seems to have survived such doubts, however, as is apparent in the tendency of scholars to continue to couch their investigations of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in that framework. The issue is certainly important enough, however, that a comprehensive reexamination of it is warranted.
The Ideals of Renewal of European Spiritual Movements in the Americas
