Did ’money matter’ in the economic history of medieval Europe? In these essays John Munro has pursued the controversies surrounding the monetary (not ’monetarist’) history of the period, specifically in relation to England and Flanders, and the other Burgundian Low Countries, during the late Middle Ages. He argues that, without doubt, monetary factors and policies were crucial, and attempts to integrate them with other factors, themselves often of equal significance, such as demographic change or institutional controls. The focus is upon the international flow of precious metals through the region and various related economic themes: the so-called late-medieval ’bullion famine’; the relation between monetary and price changes; the role of coinage in financing warfare ; ’bullionist’ mint policies as both fiscal and monetary remedies for perceived economic, political, and military problems; and the consequences of warfare, war-financing, monetary policies, and related monetary problems for the two countries' commerce, finance and industries, especially those involving woollen textiles. Quelle était la véritable importance de l’argent dans l’histoire monétaire et économique de l’Europe du Moyen Age? Au travers de ce volume, John Munro poursuit les controverses de cette période, plus spécifiquement se rapportant à l’Angleterre et aux Flandres, ainsi qu’aux autres Pays-Bas Bourguignons, vers la fin du Moyen Age. Il affirme que la politique et les facteurs monétaires étaient, sans aucun doute, d’une importance vitale et tente de les intéger à d’autres paramètres tout aussi significants, tels le changement démographique et les controles institutionnels. L’accent est mis sur la circulation internationale de métaux précieux dans toute la région, ainsi que sur divers thèmes s’y rattachant: la soit-disante ’famine d’or’ du Bas Moyen Age; le rapport entre changements monétaires et changements de prix; le rôle de la fra

The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event? In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

The papers in this edited volume discuss key elements of monetarism, including coin denominations, the role of bullion and case studies of substitute moneys.

The subject of this volume is the relationship between production and consumption, considered not only as the supply and demand sides of economic life, but within the broader context of the societies of the Low Countries between the 12th and the 16th centuries. Amongst the topics covered are the reality of the so-called 'late medieval depression', comparisons between the great merchant cities of Bruges and Antwerp, and the actual importance of the trade in art and luxury goods. One group of articles then looks in detail at the cloth industry, which remained the mainstay of the region's wealth, and the effects upon it of changes in technology and in fashion, while the volume concludes with two studies specially translated from Dutch, on wine and beer consumption.