Introduction: War, Conscience, and Counsel in Early Modern Catholic Europe

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to afocus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, po...

Institutional Conscience and Catholic Health Care

Despite serious challenges to the identity of Catholic health institutions in the United States, both Church and society should continue to see them as privileged places of moral discernment. This discernment occurs in “institutional conscience,” namely, a dialogue among all those authorized to act on the institution’s behalf about institutional actions, for example, medical interventions. The ...

The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe∗

How did Europe overtake China? We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors and use it to explain why European per capita incomes and urbanization rates surged ahead of Chinese ones. Productivity growth can only explain a small fraction of the rise in living standards. Population dynamics – changes of the birth and death schedules – were far more important drivers of the long-run Mal...

The Three Horsemen of Growth: Plague, War and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe∗

How did Europe overtake China? We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors, and use it to explain how European per capita incomes and urbanization rates could surge ahead of Chinese ones. That living standards could exceed subsistence levels at all in a Malthusian setting should be surprising. Rising fertility and falling mortality ought to have reversed any gains. We show that prod...