ABSTRACT
This volume investigates environmental and political crises that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, and considers their effects on people’s lives. At this time, the fragile human existence was imagined as a ‘Dance of Death’, where anyone, regardless of social status or age, could perish unexpectedly. This book covers events ranging from cooling temperatures and the onset of the Little Ice Age, to the frequent occurrence of epidemic disease, pest infestations, food shortages and famines.
Covering the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, this collection of essays considers a range of countries between Iceland (to the north), Italy (to the south), France (to the west) and the westernmost parts of Russia (to the east). This wide-reaching volume considers how deeply climate variability and changes affected and changed society in the late medieval to early modern period, and asks what factors, other than climate, interfered in the development of environmental stress and socio-economic crises.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental and Climate History, Environmental Humanities, Medieval and Early Modern History and Historical Geography, as well as Climate Change and Environmental Sciences.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|79 pages
Northern and Western Europe
chapter 1|16 pages
Famines, mortality, livestock deaths and scholarship
chapter 4|20 pages
War, climatic stress and environmental degradation during the 15th and 16th centuries
part 2|69 pages
Central Europe
chapter 5|18 pages
From the alpine mountain height to the Swiss Lake District
chapter 6|18 pages
Apocalyptic riders in the borderlands
chapter 7|21 pages
A dynamic interplay of weather, biological factors and socio-economic interactions
part 3|76 pages
Southern Europe and beyond