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I finally (finally, after a year of picking it up and putting it down in 4 page increments!) finished The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, by William Chester Jordan.
Oh gosh, this was an excellent book of academic history. This is the kind of book that will snark gently (and sometimes less-gently) in the end notes about the historical practices and interpretations of other historians. It's a book that manages to consider biology and weather and politics and shipping and logistics and also parades of people and kindness and desperation and it was just so dense and so much.
Definitely this ranks high in my list of books someone trying to write gritty medieval fantasy should consider as possible source material. The merchants and the abbeys and the pirates and the shipping contracts!
If you think it might be useful please be prepared for the kind of book that has about 180 pages of text and about 100+ pages of endnotes, bibliography, and index. Many of the endnotes are totally skippable, a good helping are in untranslated German, French, Latin, etc., and then there are the random ones that sneak up on you with a solid paragraph of snark and analysis. I had to read the book with two bookmarks, one for the text and one for the endnotes, so I could be sure to catch the good snarky ones.
Also, there's some really fascinating speculation (clearly labeled as speculation) about whether the long term health and immune system suppressing effect of starving during early development for people who were kids during the Great Famine might have something to do with very high mortality in the plague a generation later. I'd love to know if someone has followed up on that line of inquiry since the book was written (1996 is an oddly long time ago, now).
Content notes: Since this is a book whose subject matter is famine, a lot of awful life stuff on the part of humans. And, perhaps less expectedly, lots of animal distress. Apparently the awful weather conditions that lead to the famine also led to quite a lot of suffering on the part of domestic animals. Mentions of cannibalism and riot and murder and larceny and... ok, the tone of the book is thoughtful and nice but there is some quite distressing content (though not as bad as reading about the French Inquisition). Also, as is par for the course in Medieval Europe, apparently a lot of people reacted to disaster by killing people who stood out as different, so this might be a canon-typically distressing read if you are Jewish.
As this all sounds quite dour I hasten to add that there are some charming stories of charity and alms-giving and practical solutions and miracles and analysis of literature.
And there was So Much Logistics and economics and trade. And thinking stuff about the long term effects on people of having less salt here, or higher prices for fish there, or disruption of trade guilds and real estate markets because of short term fiscal crises. I want to say it was delicious but that seems like a really wrong word to apply to a book about famine. Satisfying? Ok, I am hungry and today I read about famine and the unfortunate food metaphors and similes keep happening. This book was good and smart and hard and I'm glad to have read it.
Oh gosh, this was an excellent book of academic history. This is the kind of book that will snark gently (and sometimes less-gently) in the end notes about the historical practices and interpretations of other historians. It's a book that manages to consider biology and weather and politics and shipping and logistics and also parades of people and kindness and desperation and it was just so dense and so much.
Definitely this ranks high in my list of books someone trying to write gritty medieval fantasy should consider as possible source material. The merchants and the abbeys and the pirates and the shipping contracts!
If you think it might be useful please be prepared for the kind of book that has about 180 pages of text and about 100+ pages of endnotes, bibliography, and index. Many of the endnotes are totally skippable, a good helping are in untranslated German, French, Latin, etc., and then there are the random ones that sneak up on you with a solid paragraph of snark and analysis. I had to read the book with two bookmarks, one for the text and one for the endnotes, so I could be sure to catch the good snarky ones.
Also, there's some really fascinating speculation (clearly labeled as speculation) about whether the long term health and immune system suppressing effect of starving during early development for people who were kids during the Great Famine might have something to do with very high mortality in the plague a generation later. I'd love to know if someone has followed up on that line of inquiry since the book was written (1996 is an oddly long time ago, now).
Content notes: Since this is a book whose subject matter is famine, a lot of awful life stuff on the part of humans. And, perhaps less expectedly, lots of animal distress. Apparently the awful weather conditions that lead to the famine also led to quite a lot of suffering on the part of domestic animals. Mentions of cannibalism and riot and murder and larceny and... ok, the tone of the book is thoughtful and nice but there is some quite distressing content (though not as bad as reading about the French Inquisition). Also, as is par for the course in Medieval Europe, apparently a lot of people reacted to disaster by killing people who stood out as different, so this might be a canon-typically distressing read if you are Jewish.
As this all sounds quite dour I hasten to add that there are some charming stories of charity and alms-giving and practical solutions and miracles and analysis of literature.
And there was So Much Logistics and economics and trade. And thinking stuff about the long term effects on people of having less salt here, or higher prices for fish there, or disruption of trade guilds and real estate markets because of short term fiscal crises. I want to say it was delicious but that seems like a really wrong word to apply to a book about famine. Satisfying? Ok, I am hungry and today I read about famine and the unfortunate food metaphors and similes keep happening. This book was good and smart and hard and I'm glad to have read it.
