"By focusing on a single year, this book attempts to draw together what have, up until now, been relatively distinct approaches to the history of the city, using the 1333/1334 famine not as an object of study in and of itself but rather as the frame for a portrait of the city as a whole. One obvious reason to focus on a year like this one is the increase in documentation that calamity tends to produce."
"But famine and shortage provide more than just a convenient trove of historical records. Food geographers have noted the many ways that food weaves its way through the social, political, economic, and cultural fabrics of any given time or place. Medieval Barcelona's food system connected the city's local, regional, and Mediterranean geographies, even as it bound together its rulers and ruled, its merchants, artisans, and laborers, its religious and secular authorities, its donors and recipients of charity, its insider and outsider groups."
A reconstruction of Barcelona's 1333–1334 famine using municipal records exposes how food linked the city's local, regional, and Mediterranean geographies. Scarcity generated abundant documentation that illuminates governance, charity, merchant networks, artisans, laborers, and relations between rulers and the ruled. Food operated across social, political, economic, and cultural fabrics, shaping insider and outsider dynamics and religious and secular authorities. Treating famine as a lens rather than an isolated event enables integrated analysis of urban institutions, social hierarchies, and economic exchange. The approach bridges social, urban, food, and political history methodologies.
Read at Medievalists.net
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