The Economic Depression of the Renaissanceстатья из журнала
Аннотация: lIT ~~~~~~~~~~I VYW henever a medievalist ventures to talk about the Renaissance, he knows that he will be automatically suspect of bias, even if he utters nothing but praise. How much more suspect when he dares to introduce economic depression in the midst of artistic plenty! At a I954 meeting of the American Historical Association, which I contend was packed with historians of art, my comments on what I then believed (and still believe) to be the basic economic trend of the Renaissance 'elicited a lively discussion', which is a polite understatement of the fact that I narrowly escaped lynching. I am willing to admit that the fault was mine. No doubt I had overstated my case, in an effort to apply an irresistible force of dissent against a seemingly unmovable consensus. Actually, the consensus did not include economic historians. Henri Pirenne, that untiring pathfinder, first expressed some doubts as to the purported continuity of economic growth in the latest thousand years, and spoke of a 'crisis of saturation' in the mid-fourteenth century; but he did not elaborate or pursue the inquiry into the following period.2 Then a handful of scholars, such as Abel, Barbagallo, Perroy, Postan, Schreiner, van Werveke (this alphabetical list does not aim at completeness), came to concurrent conclusions in a number of monographic studies.3 The independent variations on one theme became a quintet in the second volume of the Cambridge Economic History (published 1952, but written as early as I945, by one at least of its contributors). There, four or five writers, without any previous conspiracy, found themselves in agreement: not only the mid-fourteenth century, but a much longer period after it, marked some kind of slackening in the economic expansion of Europe. This slackening, it was later suggested, may also have occurred in China and the rest of the Old World, perhaps not without some relation to the general medical and climatic history of the age.4
Год издания: 1962
Авторы: Robert Sabatino Lopez, Harry A. Miskimin
Издательство: Wiley
Источник: The Economic History Review
Ключевые слова: Historical Economic and Social Studies
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 14
Выпуск: 3
Страницы: 408–426