IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 116: Famine or Shortage, I: Words and Definitions
Monday 4 July 2016, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Medieval Association of Rural Studies |
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| Organiser: | Adam Franklin-Lyons, Department of History, Marlboro College, Vermont |
| Moderator/Chair: | Marie D'Aguanno Ito, Department of History, American University, Washington, DC |
| Paper 116-a | Famines: A Concept Too Many? (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Social History |
| Paper 116-b | Identifying Famine in Medieval Sources: England in the Early 14th Century (Language: English) Index terms: Daily Life, Economics - General, Historiography - Medieval |
| Abstract | This is the first of two panels presenting research on the difference between famine and food shortage. Scholars studying contemporary famine understand that it occurs with a wide range of severity. We should similarly be attuned to the different levels of severity in medieval food crises. It is also an important question how well medieval writers and thinkers understood this distinction. In this panel, the first paper looks at the use of terms like 'famine', 'shortage', and 'dearth' in historiography to asses how modern scholars deal with these differences. The second paper looks at how medieval writers used and understood the words at their disposal to describe the severity (or lack thereof) in a food crisis. |