Reviews

The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century by William Chester Jordan

siria's review against another edition

3.0

The fourteenth century sucked in a lot of ways, not just because of the Black Death. In its early decades, several years of terrible weather combined with varied socio-economic circumstances to result in a devastating famine in northwestern Europe. William Chester Jordan brings together an impressively broad array of sources—from chronicles and annals to legal and financial records, letters, and literature—to explore the impact which the bad years of 1315-22 had. There's much here for anyone working on social history to mine, though for a more up-to-date synthesis of the information on the scientific/climate-data side of things, see Bruce Campbell's [b:The Great Transition|28144316|The Great Transition|Bruce M. S. Campbell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488179644l/28144316._SX50_.jpg|48157123].