Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Escaping the Malthusian Trap: A Statistical Study of Wages in Early Modern Europe Most people in medieval and early modern Europe lived on a Malthusian roller coaster

Most people in medieval and early modern Europe lived on a Malthusian roller coaster. The population rose and fell in giant cycles, and, as it did, wages moved in the opposite direction. High population meant low wages, and low population meant high. Malthus claimed that the wage peaks were unsustainable since he believed that population would rise whenever wages exceeded subsistence. The rolle...

The Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a Plague Cure in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

This article traces a seven-hundred-year history of one puzzling treatment for plague buboes that used the rumps of chickens to draw out the bubo's poisons. It traces the origin of the recipe to Avicenna's Canon and explores how medieval and early modern physicians altered the treatment and explained its workings up to the early eighteenth century. Much of the analysis focuses on the variants o...

A history of the university in Europe. Volume II: Universities in early modern Europe (1500–1800)

Lloyd asks who claimed to possess specialist knowledge of the body, and what it was used for. In both cultures the body was seen as a symbol of order. In Chinese medicine there was a greater interest in the social hierarchy of organs, but also the free flow of qi was seen as essential for health. Analogies between body and state were used to show that political health depended on the ruler's vi...

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...