Contextualizing Medieval Food Shortages: Causes, Definitions, and Historiography

Famine is a well-known subject to many medievalists. New approaches and evidence, however, continue to expand our possible knowledge about food shortage in the Middle Ages. The studies in this volume develop medieval famine research along two paths, one new, and one newly expanding. The first investigates how medieval actors themselves described, understood, and hence responded to food shortages, using sources across the timespan of the Middle Ages. The second explores the intersections between historical climatology, paleoclimatology, and food production. The nine histories of food shortage that the volume presents demonstrate that medieval actors responded according to their understanding of the disasters they faced, in sometimes sophisticated and in sometimes contradictory ways, and that we have much to gain by adopting a rigorous approach to both the written evidence for subsistence crises and weather patterns and to the novel scientific evidence for past climate change. An exhaustive historiographical survey of the subject and an introduction help set the stage for a next generation of work on famine in the Middle Ages. From the crises of Edward II's reign to those of Charlemagne's, from Scandinavia to Spain, the volume expands the way we think about substance crises throughout medieval Europe.