This definitive account of the nature and development of farming practices from Greek and Roman times to the mid-19th century describes how each generation of farmers based their methods on the spoken word of former centuries.

A Historical Geography of Europe provides an analytical and explanatory account of European historical geography from classical times to the modern period, including the vast changes to landscape, settlements, population, and in political and cultural structures and character that have taken place since 1500. The text takes account of the volume of relevant research and literature that has been published over the past two or three decades, in order to achieve a coverage and synthesis of this very broad range of evidence and opinion, and has tried to engage with many of the main themes and debates to give a clear indication of changing ideas and interpretations of the subject.

By the early sixteenth century, the agrarian landscape changed to more pastoral land, more enclosures, and a decrease in (or a rearrangement of) manorial lands. Increased population and an abundance of labor created economic tensions that caused moralizers to cry out for reform, but there is no evidence pastoral lands decreased even by the end of the century. In literature, the plowman tradition continued to exist in such forms as the remarkable sermon by Bishop Latimer, but more often than not it was viewed nostalgically as part of the past, and used to address the problems brought about by the pastoral economy of the sixteenth century. The plowman can be identified even as late as Spenser's Faerie Queene where he assumes the moral associations of the fourteenth-century type, and in Sidney where the plowman becomes the unsympathetic buffoon.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries form a very distinctive period in European food history. This was a time when enduring feudal constraints in some areas contrasted with widening geographical horizons and the emergence of a consumer society.While cereal based diets and small scale trade continued to be the mainstay of the general population, elite tastes shifted from Renaissance opulence toward the greater simplicity and elegance of dining à la française. At the same time, growing spatial mobility and urbanization boosted the demand for professional cooking and commercial catering. An unprecedented wealth of artistic, literary and medical discourses on food and drink allows fascinating insights into contemporary responses to these transformations. A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on food production, food systems, food security, safety and crises, food and politics, eating out, professional cooking, kitchens and service work, family and domesticity, body and soul, representations of food, and developments in food production and consumption globally.

In this volume the authors translate and annotate key passages from ancient authors to provide a history and an analysis of the origins and development of technology. Among the topics covered are: * energy * basic mechanical devices * agriculture * food processing and diet * mining and metallurgy * construction and hydraulic engineering * household industry * transport and trade * military technology. The sourcebook presents 150 ancient authors and a diverse range of literary genres, such as, the encyclopedic Natural Histories of Pliny the Elder, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius and the agricultural treatise of Varro. Humphrey, Oleson and Sherwood provide a comprehensive and accessible collection of rich and varied sources to illustrate and elucidate the beginnings of technology. Glossaries of technological terminology, indices of authors and subjects, introductions outlining the general significance of the evidence, notes to explain the specific details, and a recent bibliography make this volume a valuable research and teaching tool.

This is the first of three planned volumes which deal with the techniques and technology of agriculture in Europe in the period from 600 A.D. down to the 17th century. The focus of this first volume is Scandinavia, the British Isles, Northern Germany, the Low Countries and Northern France. The volume discusses methodological approaches and their limitations, the development of medieval agriculture in terms of the transmission of technological ideas, improvements in productivity, regional variations, social responses to agricultural technology, and those common trends that unite the Northwest European region. The volume integrates material derived from the great advances made in medieval archaeology and the historical study of landscapes during the past 30 years and has a supranational character. It will be of interest to all those working on the social, economic and political history of Northwest Europe in the medieval and early modern periods as well as to those undertaking research in the specific field of the history of technology.

This book describes the spread of new agricultural practice in the half millennium after 1350, and reconstructs a neglected part of Europe's agricultural past: the introduction of fodder crops, and the continuous reorganisation of traditional botanical inputs within a new system of farming. It breaks entirely new ground by showing the distant historical origins of a major transformation in land potential and farm productivity. A vast range of evidence is cited from Italy, France, England and elsewhere to produce in effect an economic, social and cultural history of Europe in which the focus is on the long-distance consequences of the 'agricultural revolution'.