Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 148

This book contains a bulky collection of 46 essays dedicated to an influential historian of the middle ages, François Menant. The essays reflect his very wide range of interests, and cover subjects as diverse as the development of Lombardy, the crisis around 1300 (especially in southern Europe), credit, rural elites, towns, literacy, and the practice and culture of political power. It would not be possible in a limited space to cover all of these themes, and therefore this review will focus on the rural matters most likely to interest readers of this journal.

Menant takes a sceptical view of the importance of the crisis around the year 1300, associated by continental scholars with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ historical writing. In conventional interpretations of the period, around 1300 economic growth came to an end, and the population, especially the numerous smallholders, suffered from bad harvests and famine. A number of contributors to this book demonstrate the recurrence of famine throughout the middle ages, not just in the early fourteenth century, and point to the regional differences which make it difficult to recognize a general European crisis around 1300. A small town in western France, St Jean d’Angély, which has rich documentation for the 1330s, has been studied by Petrowiste. The town’s records of commercial transactions epitomize the complexity of the period with its varied interactions between rural producers and the townspeople. A simple relationship between human population and landed resources, often regarded as lying behind the crisis, seems incompatible with the activities of the rural elites and entrepreneurs, who were involved in the rural industries discussed here by Drendel and Reyerson. Entrepreneurs persisted, and a fifteenth-century example is revealed by Verna in the form of an individual functioning as a draper, butcher and merchant in the vicinity of Perpignan, who dealt in iron. Enterprising peasants supplying Toulouse with wood fuel around 1500 are analysed by Fabre. The early fourteenth-century’s capacity for social mobility and renewal is demonstrated by To Figueras in his discovery that a significant number of peasants’ sons in Catalonia went to school. Their parents invested heavily in their education, expecting that they would have a clerical career, though they also apprenticed sons for the more mundane occupations of shoemaker and tailor.

Menant has worked on credit, and the subject is represented in this book by a number of essays. Our knowledge of trade between country and town at St Jean d’Angély comes from references to debts, and here credit can be regarded as an aid to the flow of trade, though some traders got into difficulties. At Montpellier around the same time a female trader was apparently exploiting the local peasants who received loans and paid back in pieces of the linen that they made. Smail’s study of the recovery of debts in the Lucca region suggests a growth in peasant poverty during the fourteenth century. To add to this rather negative picture of the role of credit, Laliena Corbera reveals that rural communities in Aragon would borrow money in order to pay collective royal taxes, or to fund public works such as the building of churches and bridges. Over the years these loans multiplied, and the villagers incurred substantial annual payments, so the original borrowers had saddled their successors with heavy burdens.

The countryside of Lombardy between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries was the subject of Menant’s research for his doctorate, and of course the Italian sources allow detailed analysis of regional societies and economies before the thirteenth century. In southern Europe in general the division between the early and later middle ages is not as clear cut as is the case in England, for example. The accessibility of evidence as early as the eighth and ninth centuries enables Cândido da Silva to enquire into the morality of the market for grain, and Bührer-Thierry can examine members of the rural elite in the same centuries near Lucca, with their stone houses and other signs of relative affluence. Lefeuvre uses notarial acts to identify an elite family living in the neighbourhood of Florence in the mid-twelfth century. Contributors to this book make reference to the prominence of women as advancing credit, and forming part of the rural elites, in both the early and later medieval centuries.

This volume gives us an insight into the current preoccupations of continental scholars, and presents alternatives to the doom-laden interpretation of the later middle ages which seems to be gaining strength among historical circles in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world. We also gain insights into the collective spirit of academic activity in continental Europe. The introduction by Bourin and the two editors presents the progress of historical scholarship through a series of well-planned and carefully focused conferences in which François Menant had a prominent role. Later published as books, these events mark significant stages in the advance of knowledge and understanding. Such a coordinated pursuit of a common purpose differs greatly from the individualism prevailing in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ academic world.