Medieval demographic thought. Essay review.

A book on demography without statistics, graphs or charts: is this possible? Peter Biller has masterfully shown not only that it is possible, but that a textual approach to demographic questions in Latin Christendom before the Black Death (especially around 1300) enormously enriches our understanding of demographic trends in a period which lacks systematic statistical data, in which statistical calculations can at best give us rough estimates, and in which the concept, the name, and the discipline of demography were non-existent (the name and the discipline emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century). This is not only a solid scholarly enterprise on the highest level, it is also a pedagogic manifesto of how one can and perhaps should handle historical sources. The sheer scope of the book defies any generalizing summary in a brief review. The core of the book is a meticulous analysis of what a group of scholastic thinkers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, philosophers and theologians alike, thought and wrote about fertility in Western Christian marriages, avoidance of offspring, sterility among prostitutes, sex-ratio, marriage rates, population densities in Christian and non-Christian regions, and so forth. In fourteen dense but elegantly written chapters (followed by an extremely useful