New Medieval Books: The Donkey and the Boat
There is a good chance that The Donkey and the Boat will be one of the most important books in medieval studies for 2023.
Women’s labor, with Anna Kelley
A conversation with Anna Kelley about women’s labor and occupations in the Roman and later Roman Empire. It turns out that they may have engaged in more types of business and workshop production, especially in textile manufacture and marketing, than contemporary gender norms suggest.
Horse vs Ox in Medieval Times (And Horse Power vs Horsepower Today)
Up until late medieval times, the ox is preferred to the horse on farms mostly because the animal is cheaper to own and maintain even though the horse is capable of performing and helping with a greater variety of tasks beyond helping to plow fields, and these other functions of the horse include hauling things such as produce and tools and possibly being used for traveling, herding, and hunting if necessary.
How Thomas Aquinas Influenced Economic Theory and Practice
Views on just prices and marketplace behavior from a thirteenth-century saint.
Medieval clothing and clothiers with John S. Lee
Clothing is a vital part of both our identities and our economies. So, how was cloth made and distributed in the Middle Ages? This week, Danièle speaks with John S. Lee about medieval cloth-making, and the role of the medieval clothier.
‘The big problem of the petty coins’, and how it could be solved in the late Middle Ages
To the modern eye, late medieval monetary systems exhibit a number of baffling complexities
Medieval Property Investors, ca. 1300–1500
The subject of this article is the role of freehold land and property in the developing commercial economy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Viking Currency
Buying, selling and trading in the Viking Age, and how hoards are different over the centuries.
Trade in the pre-capitalistic North Atlantic
The paper examines the evidence for international trade in 14th century Iceland based on excavations of a merchants’ camp at Gásir in North Iceland
Finding the wealthiest places in Ireland, circa 1300
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have produced a series of ground-breaking maps that illustrate the distribution of wealth in Ireland circa 1300.
Marco Polo on the Mongol State: Taxation, Predation, and Monopolization
The aim of this article is to bring attention to Marco Polo’s descriptions of economic and political features of the Mongol empire that are especially meaningful when viewed through the lens of Austrian economics.
Eight centuries of the risk-free rate: bond market reversals from the Venetians to the ‘VaR shock’
This paper presents a new dataset for the annual risk-free rate in both nominal and real terms going back to the 13th century.
Conceptualizing Labor in the Middle Ages
From the mid-fourteenth to the end o f the fifteenth century, work arguably shaped social identity to a much greater extent than in either earlier or later times.
The Global Side of Medieval at the Getty Centre: Traversing the Globe Through Illuminated Manuscripts
Los Angeles correspondent, Danielle Trynoski takes through the, ‘Traversing the Globe Through Illuminated Manuscripts’ exhibut at the Getty Museum.
Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200-1450
Starting in the mid-thirteenth century, kings, bishops, and local rulers throughout western Europe repeatedly ordered the banishment of foreigners who were lending at interest.
Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, circa 1290
Estimates are assembled for England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and for Britain and Ireland as a whole, of the numbers of religious houses, regular clergy, parishes, towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants, and townspeople, and the value of dutiable exports and volume of currency at the watershed date of circa 1290
The ‘Buying and Selling of Money for Time’: Foreign Exchange and Interest Rates in Medieval Europe
The best evidence for medieval interest rates comes from government borrowing, and especially the long-term annuities sold by the Italian city-states.
Social Roles and Status of Women in a Norfolk small market Town Heacham 1276-1324
The objective of this paper is to measure the involvement of women in the Heacham local food and drink market and to assess the social differentiation among these working women mentioned in the 43 leet courts (1276-1324 ca.)
The Struggle is Real: Where are the Medieval Economists?!
Another fascinating paper from “Making the Medieval Relevant” was given by Daniel Curtis, a specialist in Social and Economic History, and a professor at the University of Utrecht.
Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome’s Metal Economy
In actual fact, the bulk of contemporary evidence — which happens to be material rather than textual — clearly argues that the people of fifth- and early sixth-century eastern Britain were much more involved in subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that most people during much of this period lived in highly circumscribed worlds in a ranked, rather than a steeply hierarchical, society
Rapid Invention, Slow Industrialization, and the Absent Entrepreneur in Medieval China
For some sixteen centuries, about eight times the length of the period since the onset of England’s Industrial Revolution, China was the source of an astonishing outpouring of inventions that included a vast variety of prospectively valuable novelties as diverse as printing, the blast furnace, the spinning wheel, the wheelbarrow, and playing cards, in addition to the more widely recognized gunpowder and compass.
Why did they stop building tower house castles in Ireland?
One of the most visible reminders of Ireland’s medieval history are the tower house castles that are scattered throughout the country. For centuries they were the homes and fortresses for the native Irish elites as well as the English and Scottish settlers. However, by the early seventeenth-century it seems that they were now being abandoned and left the fall into ruin. What happened?
Some Remarks on the Economic Development of the Komnenian Byzantium
The purpose of this article is to identify some of the factors which contributed to this economic revival and rectify the image of Byzantium in the 12th century
Plague, Settlement and Structural Change at the Dawn of the Middle Ages
The plague of Justinian definitely hit the coastal areas of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean as well as the inland areas connected with the sea
The Rise of a Tax State: Portugal, 1367-1401
This paper uses the case of fourteenth-century Portugal to question a common assumption of “fiscal history” literature, namely the linear relationship between war-related fiscal demands increase the level of taxation.