The concept of resilience, which originally emerged in psychology, has spread to numerous disciplines and was further developed particularly in social ecology. Resilience experiences an ongoing growing reception in the humanities and historical and social sciences as well, including heterogenic approaches on how to conceptually frame resilience. Common to these approaches is, that resilience becomes topical in the context of analysing phenomena and processes of the ‘resistibility’ of certain (socio-historical) units or actors which are perceived as being faced with various constellations of disruptive change. In this context, resilience is not only taken to mean the opposite of vulnerability, but at the same time, resilience and vulnerability are understood as complementary concepts. From this perspective, vulnerability is a necessary condition of resilience and vice versa. Against this background, the present volume provides a preliminary appraisal of socio-scientific and historical resilience research by assembling contributions of authors originating from different disciplines. Thus, it fosters an interdisciplinary discussion on the theoretical and analytical potentials as well as the empirical applicability of the concept of resilience. ContentsStrategies, Dispositions and Resources – Theoretical contributions • Medieval case studies • Reflections and General Comments The EditorsDr. Martin Endreß is Professor for General Sociology at the University of Trier. Dr. Lukas Clemens is Professor for Medieval History at the University of Trier. Dr. Benjamin Rampp is research assistant for General Sociology at the University of Trier.

An environmental history of natural disasters during the eighteenth-century decline of the Dutch Republic.

Juxtaposing and interlacing similarities and differences across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions, the collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease.

This book examines Max Weber's understanding of bureaucracy by applying his ideas to the development of officialdom from the ninth century to the present in six territories: England, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, and Hungary. Edward Page takes a broad view of bureaucracy that includes not only officials in important central or national institutions but also those providing goods and services locally. The 'scorecard' is based on expected developments in four key areas of Weber's analysis: the functional differentiation of tasks within government, professionalism, formalism, and monocracy. After discussing the character of officialdom in the ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first centuries, the book reveals that Weber's scorecard has a mixed record, especially weak in its account of the development of monocracy and formalism. A final chapter discusses alternative conceptions of bureaucratic development and sets out an account based on understanding processes of routinization, institutional integration, and the instrumentalization of law.

Investigating water resource law in the statutory legislation codified by commune, oligarchic and seigneurial governments in Northern and Central Italy from the 13th-14th centuries, this book explores the relationship between water management norms and the local environment, and the protection of inhabited areas from the danger of flooding.

This book aims to shed light on the roots of sustainability in the Iberian Peninsula that lie in the interrelations between shipbuilding and forestry from the 14th to the 19th centuries, combining various geographical scales (local, regional and national) and different timespans (short-term and long-term studies). Three main themes are discussed in depth here: firstly, the roots of current conservationism in the Iberian Peninsula; the evolution of the forest policies set in motion at the local, regional and national levels to meet the demand for wood and timber; and the long-standing impact of naval empirical forestry on the conservation and transformation of the forest landscape. Therefore, the book attempts, on the one hand, to unravel the forest policies and empirical forestry implemented in the Iberian Peninsula as the roots or origins of what we refer to nowadays as "sustainability", and to assess the contribution of imperial forestry to landscape planning and the conservation of forest resources, on the other, and, finally, to break away from the prevailing theological narrative that shipbuilding was the main agent of forest destruction in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula, for which both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be conducted. This book could be of maximum interest to environmental and social historians and researchers, and anyone devoted to conducting research on the emergence and evolution of the concept of "sustainability" with respect to the governance and the historical transformation of woodlands around the world.

Jews and Health: Tradition, History, Practice investigates the value of health in the Jewish tradition and explores Jewish recommendations and practices to maintain and restore health as a state of physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.