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Bezig met laden... The Great Transition Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (editie 2016)door B. M. S. Campbell
Informatie over het werkThe Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World door Bruce M. S. Campbell
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In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition', Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)940.1History and Geography Europe Europe Medieval 476-1453LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (4.4)
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Successive chapters take in the rapid growth of Latin Christendom between about 950-1250, thanks to reliable crop yields; the post-1250 shock caused by increased climactic instability which caused repeated harvest shortfalls and improved conditions for epidemics and epizootics; the Black Death, both the first climactic irruption of the 1340s and the recurring waves of the 1360s and 1380s which were likely the ones which had far more dramatic impacts on long-term demographics; and the intersecting and various crises which continued to affect Europe until at least 1475.
Campbell is clearly most at home with the English agrarian records on which he's spent most of his career, but he draws on a vast array of European and Asian historical sources, together with contemporary scientific literature. His argument is built on everything from the mineral composition of stalactites in Chinese caves, to palaeogenomics, to charts for grain yields. (There are 78 figures alone.) The breadth of sources used is nothing other than deeply impressive, even if still largely Euro-Anglo-centric.
The close nature of Campbell's argument, together with the less than scintillating nature of his prose, means that The Great Transition is unlikely to find an audience outside of academia. Not all of his interpretations are fully borne out, I think, and new aDNA findings have already made some of Campbell's conclusions about the origins and spread of the Black Death obsolete. Yet the book is a very good example of how to balance an assessment of broad-scale climactic change and geographic contexts with an awareness of “the complexity of human actions and reactions” and “the autonomy of biological agents.” (In this, it also is a useful exemplar to set against a lot of pop "histories" which tell grand narratives that are just as sweeping as Campbell's, but which are ultimately much more reductive.) Highly recommended. (