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Agenda for Medieval Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2010
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At a time when so many people under thirty regard most people over thirty as hopeless dotards, an almost sexegenarian cannot feel too comfortable as the caster of horoscopes for future medieval research. Surely David Herlihy would have been a more suitable prophet, had he not been assigned the traditionally historiographic role of inspecting the past; so would Harry Miskimin, were he not otherwise employed. Here I am, nevertheless, with no choice but trying to race ahead as fast as I can; fifteen minutes, one and a half per century of the middle ages, are quickly gone.
- Type
- Economic History: Retrospect and Prospect. Papers Presented at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1971
References
1 Grierson, Although P., “The Volume of Anglo-Saxon Coinage,” Economic History Review, XX (1967)Google Scholar, has reacted against the grossest exaggerations of the strict constructionists of I. D. Brown's so-called “formula” of the average coin output per die, I do not think he has reacted enough. The truth of the matter seems to be that at a period of imperfect communications there is no telling how many coins may have been struck with a set of dies; and I should like to return him a warning he issued against my attempts at calculating the minimum (not the maximum, as he seemed to assume) output of the Lombard mints: “Any precise figure for mint output is more than we can ever hope to obtain”: P. Grierson, “Mint Output in the Tenth Century,” ibid, IX (1957).
2 I do not imply, of course, that it is always impossible to obtain a fairly accurate set of mutually confirming data for an individual city. There is the well known example of Florence, where the internally consistent data of Giovanni Villani have been checked by E. Fiumi against other contemporary sources and found reliable. There are the data on the population and professional distribution of thirteenth-century Bologna, recently brought together in the excellent essay of Pini, A. I., “Problemi demografici bolognesi del Duecento,” Atti e Memorie della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Provincie di Romagna, new series, XVI–XVII (1969)Google Scholar. Even for the early middle ages it is sometimes possible to make reasonable guesses such as those of Ricéhe, P., Probleèmes de démographie historique du haut moyen-âge,” Annales de Démographie Historique (1966)Google Scholar. Yet in spite of these and very many other careful studies one is still distressed at the persistent tendency of serious scholars to quote fanciful figures as if they were founded on positive evidence.
3 Concerning hypothetical or counterfactual versus comparative history, I should like to borrow a judgment expressed in another context (a review of a book by R. A. Nisbet) by Arnaldo Momigliano, “In a Fix,” New York Review of Books, 26 February 1970: “The question whether what happened might not have happened, or [whether it] happened inevitably, is not a question to which a historian can provide an answer…. But the question of inevitability in history makes sense if asked in a context of comparative and systematic studies of institutions and civilizations.”
4 Cook, M. A., editor, Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. See also the equally recent book of Udovitch, A., Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 It is unnecessary to list here the most valuable works on medieval Chinese economic history, especially as the subject falls in the province of other experts at the present meeting; let me only mention with gratitude such writers as D. C. Twitchett, Ping-ti Ho, Lien-sheng Yang, E. Franke, and the late E. Balasz, from whom western medievalists can Team so much. But I would advocate closer collaboration between students of the Far East and of the West, not so much to postulate universally applicable models (are there any?) as to test how two unrelated or slightly related societies reacted to the same economic problems. One case in point is money and credit, on which my rash attempts at comparison in Il ritorno allʼoro nell' Occidente duecentesco (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1955)Google Scholar ought to be revisited, confuted, and set right by someone less incompetent than I.
6 Robert, D., Robert, S., Devisse, J., Tegdaoust I, Recherches sur Aoudaghost (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1970)Google Scholar. Two more volumes are being prepared.
7 Hoffmann, R., Studies in the Rural Economy of the Duchy of Wroclaw (unpublished dissertation, Yale University, 1970)Google Scholar; Bautier, R. H. and Somay, J., Les sources de l'histoire économique et sociale du moyen âge: Provence, Comtat Venaissin, Dauphiné, Etats de la maison de Savoie, I (Paris: Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968)Google Scholar. The latter represents only one group of sources, probably not the most enlightening; another group, for the same region, is briefly but carefully described in Gouron, A., “Les archives notariales des anciens pays de droit écrit au moyen âge,” Recueil de Mémoires et Travaux publicés par la Société d'Histoire du Droit et aes Institutions des Anciens Pays du Droit Ecrit, fasc. V (Montpellier 1966)Google Scholar. Southeastern France, of course, is much poorer in economic sources than northern and central Italy!
8 Let me stress that I am speaking only of international meetings of medieval economic historians and do not intend to belittle other organizations and gatherings devoted to economic history in general in this country.