From lateness to Waning to crisis: The burden of the later Middle Ages

Journal of Early Modern History

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 85-125

  Kaminsky, Howard ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33749988658     PISSN: 13853783     EISSN: 15700658     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157006500X00141     Document Type: Review

References (196)

1. The first quote in Walter Buckl, "Das 14. Jahrhundert. Eine Einführung," in Das 14. Jahrhundert: Krisenzeit, ed. W. Buckl (Regensburg, 1995), 9-17, 10 f. (my emphasis)
2. the second in Hartmut Boockmann, "Tausend Jahre Verlegenheit zwischen Antike und Neuzeit: Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter- Umrisse des Mittelalters," in Nachdenken über Geschichte (K. D. Erdmann Festschr.) (Neumünster, 1991), 367-81, here 380
3. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (1924; repr. New York, 1954)
4. The titles of the Dutch original of 1919, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over Levens- en Gedachtenvormen der Veertiende en Vijftiende Eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden, and the authoritative German translation of 1923 have Herfsttij and Herbst, meaning "autumn," and this word has been restored in the new translation by Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitz, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996)
5. These words for autumn have the primary meaning of (our cognate) "harvest(time)," which is how Heiko Oberman took Huizinga's "autumn" in The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 5
6. But the present essay, concerned with the way the 1924 translation has shaped the thinking of three generations of Anglophonic medievalists, works with this version and its "waning," rather than with the Dutch original or the more complete and allegedly more faithful 1996 translation, which lacks the magic of its predecessor and seems anyway to have approached the Dutch by way of the German - so Walter Simons in Speculum (1997), 488-91
7. and Wessel Krul, "In the Mirror of van Eyck: Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997), 353-84, here 353 f
8. So, for example, twenty years ago Peter Burke, "The History of Johan Huizinga," TLS (13 December 1974), 1423, discussed Huizinga's youthful enthusiasm for fin-de-siècle decadence in relation to his historical work as an available aperçu
9. Wessel Krul, "In the Mirror of van Eyck," 354-73, notes 40 and 60, for this and the rest of this paragraph
10. Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons, "The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages," Speculum 74 (1999), 587-620, which appeared after the present essay had been dispatched, discusses some of the topics covered here, also on the basis of Krul's work
11. Cf. Erich Meuthen, "Gab es ein spätes Mittelalter?" Spätzeit: Studien zu den Problemen eines historischen Epochenbegriffs, ed. J. Kunisch (Berlin, 1990), 91-135, here 108 f.: "towards the end of the nineteenth century nostalgia for the late medieval issues in a fin-de-siècle disposition, which," he adds, "in the first decades of the twentieth century condenses into a European appetite for crisis, Untergang, and catastrophe." Indeed, "the bleaker the twentieth-century outlook, the more intensively did modern medievalists discover the 'crisis' of the Late Middle Ages."
12. I adapt the argument of Aileen Kraditor, "American Radical Historians on Their Heritage," Past & Present 56 (August 1972), 136-53, here 137
13. For the disposition to search for decadence and crisis see Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Age: une imposture (Paris, 1992), 41 f
14. e siècles (Paris, 1986)
15. K. B. McFarlane, Hans Memling (Oxford, 1971), 44 f
16. So, for example, Eric Acheson, A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422-c.1485 (Cambridge, 1992), 200 f., blames the Waning model for the thematization (in English history) of "the economic depression, a disastrous and protracted war in France, the decline of kingship, the increasing lawlessness and 'political gangsterdom' of an over-mighty nobility and the resulting drift to civil war."
17. Hartmut Hoffmann, "Das Braunschweiger Umland in der Agrarkrise des 14. Jahrhunderts," Deutsches Archiv 37 (1981), 162-286, here 162: "Über die grosse europäische Krise des 14. Jahrhunderts, ihre Entstehung, ihren Verlauf glaubt man recht gut Bescheid zu wissen. Sie ist jedenfalls - unter Historikern - zu einem geflügelten Wort geworden."
18. Europa 1400. Die Krise des Spätmittelalters, ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart, 1984)
19. František Graus, "Das Spätmittelalter als Krisenzeit," Mediaevalia Bohemica 1 (1969), Supplementum (Prague, 1969; a critical survey of the scholarship)
20. cf. Thomas Bisson's reference to "European societies passing through the crisis of the later Middle Ages," in Speculum 73 (1998), 806
21. Peter Schuster, "Die Krise des Spätmittelalters. Zur Evidenz, eines sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Paradigmas in der Geschichtsschreibung des 20. Jahrhunderts," Historische Zeitschrift 269 (1999), 19-55
22. František Graus, Pest-Geissler-Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit (2nd ed.; Göttingen, 1988)
23. e siècle en Europe occidentale," Les Études Sociales n.s. 42-43 (1959), 1-19
24. Before the Black Death: Studies in the "Crisis" of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. Bruce Campbell (Manchester, 1991)
25. Barbara F. Harvey, "Introduction: The 'Crisis' of the Early Fourteenth Century," in Before the Black Death, 1-24
26. Anthony Goodman, 'John of Gaunt: Paradigm of the Late Fourteenth-Century Crisis," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series, 37 (1987), 133-48
27. Werner Paravicini, "Die Krise der französischen Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Hundertjährigen Krieges," in Europa 1400, 210-20
28. Reinhard Schneider, "Königtum in der Krise? Eine Zusammenfassung," in Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich, ed., R. Schneider, Vorträge und Forschungen 32 (Sigmaringen, 1987), 279-94
29. Raymond Cazelles, La société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe VI de Valois (Paris, 1958)
30. Hillay Zmora, "Princely State-Making and the 'Crisis of the Aristocracy' in Late Medieval Germany," Past & Present 153 (November 1996), 37-63
31. Robert Boutruche, La crise d'une société: Seigneurs et paysans du Bordelais pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg (Paris, 1947; repr. 1963)
32. Wilhelm Abel, Strukturen und Krisen der spätmittelalterlichen Wirtschaft, Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte (Stuttgart, 1980)
33. E. Pitz, "Die Wirtschaftskrise des Spätmittelalters," Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 52 (1965), 347-67
34. Malcolm D. Lambert, "England: die Krise im geistigen Leben," in Europa 1400, 191-9
35. Ian Kershaw, "The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England 1315-1322," Past & Present 59 (May 1973), 3-50
36. Peter Kriedte, "Spätmittelalterliche Agrarkrise oder Krise des Feudalismus," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981), 42-68
37. Hartmut Hoffmann, "Das Braunschweiger Umland in der Agrarkrise des 14. Jahrhunderts," Deutschs Archiv 37 (1981), 162-286
38. e siècle en Artois et en Flandre gallicante," Recueil de travaux offerts à M. Clovis Brunel (Paris, 1955), 436-47
39. Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française (repr. Paris, 1952; orig. Oslo, 1931), 117 ff.: the "crise des fortunes seigneuriales;"
40. Philippe Contamine, "Points de vue sur la chevalerie en France à la fin du Moyen Age," Francia 4 (1976), 255-85, here 271: the end of the Middle Ages was "une période de crise des revenus seigneuriaux."
41. This crisis was first imagined by Rodney Hilton, "Y-cut-il une crise générale de la féodalité?" Annales E. S. C. (1951), 23-30
42. there is an English version, "Was there a General Crisis of Feudalism?" in Hilton's Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London, 1990), 166-72
43. cf. idem, "A Crisis of Feudalism," Past & Present 80 (August 1978), 3-19
44. Others have accepted the idea: for example, František Graus (who subsequently changed his mind), "Krise feodalizmu v 14 století [A crisis of feudalism in the fourteenth century]," Sborník historický 1 (1953), 65-121
45. cf. idem, "Die erste Krise des Feudalismus" Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 4 (1955)
46. John Day, "'Crise du féodalisme' et conjoncture des prix à la fin du moyen âge," Annales 34 (1979), 305-18
47. Maurice Keen, "War, Peace and Chivalry," in War and Peace in the Middle Ages, ed. B. P. McGuire (Copenhagen, 1987)
48. repr. Keen, Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (London, 1996), 9, proposing a "crisis of chivalry in the fourteenth century," when the overproduction of military forces "erupted in the form of the Free Companies."
49. Luis Suarez Fernandez, Castilla, el Cisma y la crisis conciliar (1378-1440) (Madrid, 1960)
50. cf. A. Rogers, "The Political Crisis of 1401," Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 12 (1968), 85-96
51. e siècle (Paris, 1990)
52. Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth-Century England ed. John Taylor and Wendy Childs (Gloucester, 1990)
53. Teofilo F. Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia, 1994)
54. Burckhardt, Über das Studium der Geschichte [Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen] (Munich, 1982), 205-14
55. Reinhart Koselleck, "Krise," Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe 3 (Stuttgart, 1982), 617-50, here 648 f
56. for "die bekannte Unschärfe des Krisenbegriffs" see Roger Sablonier, "Zur wirtschaftlichen Situation des Adels im Spätmittelalter," Adelige Sachkultur des Spätmittelalters, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für mittelalterliche Realienkunde Österreichs 5 (1982), 9-34, here 10
57. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (revised ed.; Princeton, NJ, 1966), 443
58. "The supposition of comprehensive societal crises slides easily into posing crises of centuries-long duration, and this is to liquidate the crisis concept" - Hartmut Boockmann, "Zu den geistigen und religiösen Voraussetzungen des Bauernkriegs," in Bauernkriegs-Studien, ed. B. Moeller (Gütersloh, 1975), 9-27, here 24 f
59. Cf. Schuster, "Die Krise des Spätmittelalters," for the idea of an enduring crisis of the Late Middle Ages as "something imagined by the twentieth century" to bridge the gap between "medieval" and "modern."
60. Hartmut Boockmann, "Das fünfzehnte Jahrhundert in der deutschen Geschichte," Mittelalterforschung nach der Wende 1989, ed. Michael Borgolte (Munich, 1995), 485-511, here 497
61. Pest-Geissler-Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit
62. At the end of the sixties, after a steady movement away from Marxism towards Annaliste social history cum mentalities, he produced a substantial survey of the scholarship, "Das Spätmittelalter als Krisenzeit: Ein Literaturbericht als Zwischenbilanz," Mediaevalia Bohemica 1 (1969), Supplementum (Prague, 1969)
63. - for an English version see Graus, "The Crisis of the Middle Ages and the Hussites," in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Stephen Ozment (Chicago, 1971), 77-103
64. Seibt, "Zu einem neuen Begriff von der Krise des Spätmittelalters," in Europa 1400, 7-23, here 9-15
65. for the second see his "Spätmittelalterliche Krisen," in Stauferzeit und spätes Mittelalter: Deutschland 1125-1517 (Berlin, 1987), 242-6; the central passage reads, "eine in allen ihren Gliedern miteinander kommunizierende Gesellschaft."
66. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," Past & Present 80 (August 1978), 3-19
67. repr., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. Aston and C. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), 120
68. See The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. R. Hilton (London, 1976)
69. R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1985) (Holton and Hilton are two men)
70. For a Marxist dissent cf. Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975), 287, on "the theoretical status of ... retrospective analyses devoted to the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism": "What, to put it bluntly, is the value of an analysis in which the end result of a development appears to govern the definition of the object of investigation so that the development is represented, in effect, as the process of constitution of its pre-given conclusion?"
71. So for example, E. Pitz, "Die Wirtschaftskrise des Spätmittelalters," Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 52 (1965), 347-67, here 348, referring to "structural changes that were the birth pangs of an economic order whose productive capacity began to rely on Kapitalgüter and capital investment;"
72. R. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," here 14
73. e siècles comme l'époque de la décadence de l'économie européenne?" Studi in onore de Armando Sapori 1 (Milan, 1957), 553-69, here 565 f
74. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (revised ed. ; London, 1990), "Introduction."
75. Hilton, "Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists" (orig. 1983), in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism, 1-11
76. For the French context cf. Guy Bois as quoted in the next note; Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past & Present 70 (February 1976), 30-75
77. Cf. idem, "Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy," Past & Present 79 (May 1978), 60-69
78. repr. in Agrarian Class Structure, 107-18
79. That the specific character of feudal relations of production lay in the coercive extraction of surplus product and surplus labor is a Marxist axiom, also maintained by Hilton, whose validity is self-evident in its own terms but whose utility is conditional on a non-dialectical idea of coercion, inattention to Gramscian "hegemony," and certain moral judgments about private property and rent, for which see S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (New York, 1995), 52-7
80. Cf. Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch (Frankfurt/New York, 1996), for other aspects of coercion
81. Bois, Crise du féodalisme, 239-46
82. Bois, Crise du féodalisme. (Paris, 1976), 361, 342. He sets the actual movement towards capitalism in the period after 1510/20
83. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," repr. The Brenner Debate, 135 f
84. So, for example, John Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia, 1996), 5 ff.: inasmuch as nearly all nobles got most of their income from seigneurial rents and demesne produce, "Any conditions that eroded seigneurial revenues and threatened noble purchasing power not only affected their political behavior but also jeopardized the very status of the lesser lords. This threat became a harsh reality during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a time of crisis for seigneurial revenues or, as the Marxists would have it, a 'crisis of feudalism.'"
85. Genicot, "Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times," The Cambridge Economic History of Europe 1 (2d ed.; Cambridge, 1966), 739-41. (The contrast here between village and manor perhaps comes down to money rents vs. labor services.)
86. Genicot, "Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times," 706-12
87. Other writers on the subject also note the various ways in which nobles coped - see for example, René Fédou, "La noblesse en France à la fin du moyen âge," Acta Universitatis Lodziensis I, No. 71 (1980), 49-63, here 52 f
88. So Bois, Crise du féodalisme, 364
89. Philipp R. Schofield, "Tenurial Developments and the Availability of Customary Land in a Later Medieval Community," Economic History Review 49 (1996), 250-67
90. M. A. Barg, "O tak nazyvaemom 'krizise feodalizma' v XIV-XV vekakh: K istoriografii voprosa [On the alleged 'crisis of feudalism' in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries: On the historiography of the question]," Voprosy istorii 8 (1960), 94-113, here 108-11
91. Cf. Kosminsky, "The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the XIth to the XVth Centuries," Past & Present 7 (1955), 12-36
92. For other Marxist views of the Late Middle Ages as a time of progress within feudalism see František Graus, "Das Spätmittelalter als Krisenzeit," 33
93. So Joseph Morsel: "le destin de la noblesse se joue à un autre niveau que celui de la seigneurie" - in "Crise? Quelle crise? Remarques à propos de la prétendue crise de la noblesse allemande à la fin du Moyen Age," Sources. Travaux historiques 14 (1988), 17-42, here 29
94. Peter Kriedte, "Spätmittelalterliche Agrarkrise oder Krise des Feudalismus," 60 ff.; and see above
95. On these troubles see for example, Roger Sablonier, "Zur wirtschaftlichen Situation des Adels im Spätmittelalter," Adelige Sachkultur des Spätmittelalters, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für mittelalterliche Realienkunde Österreichs 5 (1982), 9-34, here 27 ff
96. Cf. Schuster, "Die Krise des Spätmittelalters," 50 ff., for references to scholars who have found rural and urban crises already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
97. Zmora, "Princely State-Making and the 'Crisis of the Aristocracy' in Late Medieval Germany," 57 ff. , 51-3
98. cf. idem, State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany: The Knightly Feud in Franconia, 1440-1567 (Cambridge, 1997), 53 ff
99. and passim. For similar doubts see Sablonier, "Zur wirtschaftlichen Situation," 14
100. Markus Bittmann, Kreditwirtschaft und Finanzierungsmethoden: Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Verhältnissen des Adels im westlichen Bodenseeraum 1300-1500 (Stuttgart, 1991)
101. So, for example, Guy Fourquin, Histoire économique de l'Occident médiéval (2d ed.; Paris, 1969), ch. xiii: "La grande dépression de la fin du moyen âge et ses limites;"
102. Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme, "at the end of ... The Middle Ages ... The greater part of the continent was ... in the grip of a deep depression [dépression]"; M. M. Postan, "Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages," The Cambridge Economic History of Europe 2 (Cambridge, 1952), 214, "the commercial and industrial depression of the later Middle Ages."
103. e siècle," Annales 9 (1949), 167-82
104. M. M. Postan, "The Fifteenth Century," Economic History Review 9 (1938/9), 160-67
105. idem, "Some Evidence of Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages," Economic History Review 2d ser., 2 (1950), 221-46
106. the quote from idem, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1975; orig. 1972), 39
107. The summary and quotes that follow are taken from Abel, Strukturen und Krisen der spätmittelalterlichen Wirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1980), 5 ff., 130-32
108. this would be his last word on the subject. For his earlier views cf. his "Bevölkerungsgang und Landwirtschaft im ausgehenden Mittelalter im Lichte der Preis- und Lohnbewegung," Schmollers Jahrbuch 58 (1934), 33-62
109. idem, "Wachstumsschwankungen mitteleuropäischer Völker seit dem Mittelalter," Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 142 (1935), 670 ff
110. idem, Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zur Siedlungs- und Agrargeschic.hu Deutschlands (orig. 1943; 2d ed., Stuttgart, 1955)
111. idem, "Wüstungen und Preisfall im spätmittelalterlichen Europa," Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 165 (1953), 380-427
112. For a critical discussion see Schuster, "Die Krise des Spätmittelalters. "
113. So, for example, A. R. Bridbury, Economic Growth: England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1962), describes the thirteenth century as a period of acute crisis, due to rising population, scarce land, and a greater exploitation of the peasantry leading to a drop in productivity. He reads the two following centuries as a time of upswing, when famine and plague warded off the threat of over-population; the fifteenth century indeed was "the golden age of the middle classes and the peasantry." The image of late-medieval economic decline "is based on an old prejudice."
114. Robert-Henri Bautier, The Economic Development of Medieval Europe, trans. Heather Karolyi (London, 1971), 190-209
115. Barbara F. Harvey, "The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 42 (1966), 23-42
116. cf. John M. W. Bean, "Plague, Population and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 15 (1963), 423-37
117. There is a good recent mise au point of the still disputed issues by Mark Bailey, "Peasant Welfare in England, 1290-1348," Economic History Review 51 (1998), 223-51
118. Richard M. Smith, "Demographic Developments in Rural England, 1300-48: A Survey," in Before the Black Death, 25-77, here 53
119. Cf. J. L. Bolton in American Historical Review 102 (1997), 437
120. a review of Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts, 1086-1348 (New York, 1995), "Miller and Hatcher may not, in the end, make their minds up about change in the economy before the advent of the plague, but, then, neither has anyone else." I have not found discussions of comparable intensity conducted elsewhere in Europe, for example in regard to Abel's German Wüstungen
121. Guy Fourquin, Histoire économique de l'Occident médiéval (Paris, 1969), 333, summarizing the work of Abel and others: in Germany, "sur les 170,000 localités rurales existant vers 1300, 40,000 environ avaient disparu d'Allemagne en 1500"; in England about 20% of the villages disappeared; in Sicily 50%; in France, on the other hand, the figure is much lower
122. See, for England, Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London, 1954)
123. Deserted Medieval Villages, ed. Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst (London, 1971)
124. cf. M. W. Beresford and J. K. S. St Joseph, Medieval England: An Aerial Survey (2d ed.; Cambridge, 1979), for photographs dramatically revealing abandoned villages underneath modern fields (some of the English lost villages date from post-medieval enclosures but most were abandoned in the Late Middle Ages)
125. Fourquin, Histoire économique, 334, "les lost villages apparaîtraient quelquefois comme une marque de progrès économique;" 347, "un net assainissement dans le secteur primaire."
126. William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, 1996), makes a good case for the continuance of the famine well after the usual end date of 1317 and also gives the most comprehensive account of its depth and extent, the latter comprising the continent north of the Loire and Alps as well as the British Isles
127. Jordan, The Great Famine, 15 ff
128. considers both, drawing chiefly from Pierre Alexandre, Le climat en Europe au moyen âge (Paris, 1987)
129. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 43: "In ordinary circumstances a decline in population ... could be expected to correct itself by its own inherent momentum. For as population declined the ratio of land to men could improve and the ability of men to raise enough food to sustain themselves, to marry and to breed, would accordingly be enhanced."
130. See for example the discussion of differential recovery in Mavis Mate, "The Agrarian Economy of South-East England before the Black Death: Depressed or Buoyant?" in Before the Black Death, 78-109
131. e siècle."
132. For these and the immediately following figures see Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (London, 1976), 200-203
133. For the rest I cite some recent surveys bearing on the main points: Klaus Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa: Die Grosse Pest und das Ende des Mittelalters (Munich, 1994)
134. František Graus, Pest-Geissler-Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit
135. J. Hatcher, "England in the Aftermath of the Black Death," Past & Present 144 (1994), 3-35
136. The Black Death, ed. R. Horrox (Manchester, 1994)
137. Jürgen lbs, Die Pest in Schleswig-Holstein von 1350 bis 1547/48: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie über eine wiederkehrende Katastrophe (Frankfurt am Main, 1994)
138. e siècle."
139. Mark Bailey, "Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research," Economic History Review 49 (1996), 1-19
140. The English population actually dwindled from the 1370s (2.8 million) to the 1520s (2.3 million), something that he thinks cannot be explained merely by the high initial mortality (some put it as high as 45%) or the long-term recurrences. For the figure of 45% see Jeremy Goldberg, "Introduction, " The Black Death in England, ed. W. M. Ormrod and P. G. Lindley (Stamford, 1996), 1-5
141. cf. Nils Hybel, Crisis or Change: The Concept of Crisis in th Light of Agrarian Structural Reorganization in Late Medieval England, trans. James Manley, Acta Jutlandica 66:1, Humanities Series 64 (Aarhus, 1989), 154-6
142. The continuing decline of population had been noticed by J. Saltmarsh, "Plague and Economic Decline in England in the Late Middle Ages," The Cambridge Historical Journal 7 (1941-43), 23-41, who conjectured the "cumulative effect" of "a permanent infection of England by a new and fatal disease."
143. Cf. J. M. W. Bean, "Plague, Population and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages," Economic History Review 2d ser. 15 (1963), 423-37, for the thesis, not generally accepted, that population was stagnant only until ca. 1400 but then rose throughout the fifteenth century
144. e siècle)," in Contamine et al., L'économie médiévale (Paris, 1993), 329-83
145. Jaroslav Meznik, "Mory v Brně ve 14. století [Plagues in Brno in the fourteenth century]," Mediaevalia Historica Bohemica 3 (1993), 225-34
146. Denys Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 1966), 31-33 ("famine and undernourishment prepared the way")
147. Douglas C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973), 23 ("a fall in living standards to the point where famine and pestilence preyed on society")
148. R. H. Hilton and H. Fagan, The English Rising of 1381 (London, 1950), 22
149. See the similar findings of Michael Toch, Deutsches Archiv 52 (1996), 759 f
150. Hatcher, "England in the Aftermath of the Black Death," 32-35
151. Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le Bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 571-75
152. idem, "La stabilisation de la monnaie par la création du franc (décembre 1360). Blocage d'une société," Traditio 32 (1976), 293-311
153. See, for example, Robert S. Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture," in The Renaissance: A Symposium (New York, 1953), 19-32
154. I use the reprint in The Renaissance: Medieval or Modern?, ed. K. Dannenfeldt (Boston, 1959), 50-61, here 56: "the incoming and outgoing wares subject to tax in the port of Genoa were valued at £3,822,000 Genoese in 1293
155. The figure fell to £887,000 in 1424. In 1530 it was still more than one million short of the 1293 level...." See also Robert S. Lopez and Hary A. Miskimin, "The Economic Depression of the Renaissance," Economic History Review 2d ser., 14 (1962), 408-26
156. For the English woolens see Natalie Fryde, "Die Krisen des Spätmittelalters in England in der angelsächsigen wirtschaftshistorischen Forschung der letzten zwanzig Jahre," Europa 1400, 178-80
157. also Carlo Cipolla as cited below; for the rest see the critical discussion by Reinhold C. Mueller, "Die wirtschaftliche Lage Italiens im Spätmittelalter," Europa 1400, 221-246
158. e siècles comme l'époque de la décadence de l'économie européenne?" Studi in onore de Armando Sapori 1, 553-69, here 560 f
159. e siècle: Les structures et le hasard," in Spannungen und Widersprüche: Gedenkschrift für František Graus, ed. S. Burghartz (Sigmaringen, 1992), 13-20
160. John Hatcher, "England in the Aftermath of the Black Death," 5 f. (refuting the thesis)
161. Friedrich Lütge, "Das 14./15. Jahrhundert in der Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte," Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 162 (1950), 161-213, even proposed (213) ending the Middle Ages not in 1500 but in 1350, when there began that "boiling torrent" that has marked the history of Europe ever since, and when "lines of development were broken that would have led in quite different directions."
162. e siècle," 13-20
163. Lütge, "Das 14./15. Jahrhundert," 169-77
164. cf. Carlo Cipolla as quoted below; also his "Economic Depression of the Renaissance?" Economic History Review 2d ser., 16 (1964), 519-24
165. also R. Horrox as cited above (for current shifts in attitude); Jim Bolton, "'The World Upside Down'. Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change," in The Black Death in England, 17-78; a number of data in this sense are given by Cipolla, as cited just below
166. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (London, 1976), 200-203 ("The Renaissance" was Lopez's term for the Later Middle Ages)
167. Abel, Strukturen und Krisen der spätmittelalterlichen Wirtschaft, 130-32
168. Otto Brunner, "Das 'ganze Haus' und die alteuropäische 'Ökonomik,'" Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte (2d ed.; Göttingen, 1968), 103-27
169. Witold Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal (Paris, 1970; Polish orig. 1962/3), 140
170. Graus, Pest-Geissler-Judenmorde, 543, 549
171. So, for example, Barbara Harvey, "Introduction: The 'Crisis' of the Early Fourteenth Century," in Before the Black Death, 19 f., observed the failure of "every attempt to identify a primary factor bringing about irreversible changes in the economy in the early fourteenth century" - not surprising "given the fragmented condition of the economy ... and the diverse social structures then in existence." Striking from another direction M. A. Barg, "O tak nazyvaemom 'krizise feodalizma,'" criticized Postan and Abel for, respectively, assuming the existence of a "'pure economic' sphere which develops in correspondence to immanent laws that remain unchanged regardless of the historical differences of epochs," and for supposing that "the peasant economy can be grasped ... according to bourgeois market principles."
172. Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal, 3, 16
173. Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal, 79-83
174. So for example, Bridbury, Economic Growth: England in the Later Middle Ages
175. Graus, Pest-Geisler-Judenmorde, Part V, "Die Krise," 530-35
176. Archibald R. Lewis, "The Closing of the Medieval Frontier 1250-1350," Speculum 33 (1958), 475-83, here 480 f
177. and for England, Mark Bailey, "Per impetum maris: Natural Disaster and Economic Decline in Eastern England, 1275-1350," in Before the Black Death, 184-208. The data are not overwhelmingly coercive and one has to ask if the cheerless picture elicited from them is not itself determined by the Waning model
178. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Princeton, 1993). It is to be noted that Bartlett does not make any play with themes of late-medieval decadence, etc
179. For the first quote and its context, see John Boler in Speculum 72 (1997), 834-6
180. review of Robert Holcot, Seeing the Future Clearly: Questions on Future Contingents by Robert Holcot, ed. Paul Streveler et al. (Toronto, 1995)
181. For the last see John Marenbon in Speculum 73 (1998), 869
182. reviewing C. Martin, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1996) and attacking Martin's view "that medieval philosophy reached its culmination in Aquinas's 'synthesis' and then rapidly declined;"
183. most historians today rather see the fourteenth century as "one of the liveliest periods of medieval philosophy." Cf. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, 423-28, rejecting the notion of "the disintegration of late medieval thought" as well as the characterization of "nominalism" (Holcot, Ockham) as a "basic corruption of Christian thought" or as skepticism tending to dissolve a (Thomistic) "synthesis."
184. Those who find this notion bizarre are referred to the several respectable scholars cited just below who have seriously proposed it, also to the more recent polemic of Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Age: une imposture (Paris, 1992), whose aim is "to deny the existence" of the Middle Ages (28 f.), pointing out that a period is after all defined and given substance by the historian, who then "contemplates the traits for which he alone is responsible" - "everything is his own work, according to his own will," and "nothing of it has really existed." Timothy Reuter, "Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?" Medieval History Journal 1 (1998), 25-45, provides a relaxed but bibliographically useful entrée to the subject
185. Dietrich Gerhard, "Periodization in European History," American Historical Review 61 (1956), 903 ff
186. idem, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000-1800 (New York, 1981)
187. Émile Lousse, La société d'ancien régime 1 (Louvain, 1943)
188. Otto Brunner, "Inneres Gefüge des Abendlandes," Historia Mundi 6 (Berne, 1958), 319-8
189. idem, Neue Wege der Verfassungs-und Sozialgeschichte (2d ed.; Göttingen, 1968), passim
190. so too Stephan Skalweit, Der "moderne Staat". Ein historischer Begriff und seine Problematik (Opladen, 1975), 26 f., notes the growing consensus in favor of a new "Mittelalter" running from 1100/1200/1300 to 1800
191. cf. Reuter, "Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?" 34
192. Also Erich Meuthen, "Gab es ein spätes Mittelalter?" 132 f.: "Present-day medievalists sec in the breaks and innovations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries processes so momentous (fortwirkende) that they are more and more inclined to dissolve the 'medieval' epoch and join its second half with the first centuries of the 'modern' period, to compose a new epoch of European history.... 'Alteuropa.'"
193. So, for example, Michael Clanchy, "Inventing Thirteenth-Century England: Stubbs, Tout, Powicke - Now What?" Thirteenth Century England 5 (Woodbridge, 1993), 1-20, observes (13) that "no contemporary in thirteenth-century England has recorded that he or she lived in an harmonious or rational time. On the contrary, they recollected civil wars, bad harvests and 'the men who wander about the countryside doing, committing and procuring many evil deeds.'"
194. Boockmann, "Tausend Jahre Verlegenheit," 380
195. For more substantial argument in this sense see Howard Kaminsky, "The Problematics of 'Heresy' and 'The Reformation'," in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Smahel, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 39 (Munich, 1998), 1-22
196. Joseph Morsel, "Crise? Quelle crise?" 32 f., observes that the nobility as the embodiment of certain social values cannot be in crisis because its privileged access to power entails a reconfiguration of itself into a means of such access; nor did other secular values supplant its own - indeed burgher milieux cultivated noble values (tournaments) and sought titles of nobility