In the early 1980s, Duccio Balestracci discovered in a Sienese archive two account books kept from 1450 to 1502 by a Tuscan peasant named Benedetto del Massarizia. Benedetto knew how to read but not how to write. Infected by the urban habit of detailed personal record keeping, he asked various of his literate acquaintances to put into writing the details of his daily affairs. The resulting account books offer an unparalleled glimpse into the economic and social world of late medieval peasants.
In Renaissance in the Fields, Balestracci uses these account books and a host of...
In the early 1980s, Duccio Balestracci discovered in a Sienese archive two account books kept from 1450 to 1502 by a Tuscan peasant named Benedetto...
This book offers an original discussion of an element--water--and its relationship with people. In particular it shows how early medieval Italian societies coped with the problems of having too much or too little water, and analyzes their use of it. Such treatment illuminates both the workings of postclassical societies and of the environments in which these societies lived. Domestic usage, bathing, irrigation and drainage, fishing, and milling all receive full coverage.
This book offers an original discussion of an element--water--and its relationship with people. In particular it shows how early medieval Italian soci...
This modern english translation of all the surviving literary compositions ascribed to Liudprand, the bishop of Cremona from 962 to 972, offers unrivaled insight into society and culture in western Europe during the "iron century." Since Liudprand enjoyed the favor of the Saxon Roman emperor Otto the Great, and traveled to Constantinople more than once on official business, his narratives also reveal European attitudes toward the Byzantine Empire and the culture of its refined capital city. No other tenth-century writer had such privileged access to the high spheres of power, or such acerbic...
This modern english translation of all the surviving literary compositions ascribed to Liudprand, the bishop of Cremona from 962 to 972, offers unriva...
A collaborative study of the uses of water and the technologies employed to use it in medieval Europe. Experts on different areas of water use and of the European continent contribute separate studies to it so as to produce the first comprehensive survey of the techniques people used to harness, and defend themselves from, water in western Christendom between 500 and 1500. Each chapter sets the technologies of fishing, land drainage, irrigation, flood control, urban, domestic, and ecclesiastical water supply within a social and cultural context. Of interest to historians of technology and...
A collaborative study of the uses of water and the technologies employed to use it in medieval Europe. Experts on different areas of water use and of ...
This book offers an original discussion of an element--water--and its relationship with people. In particular it shows how early medieval Italian societies coped with the problems of having too much or too little water, and analyzes their use of it. Such treatment illuminates both the workings of postclassical societies and of the environments in which these societies lived. Domestic usage, bathing, irrigation and drainage, fishing, and milling all receive full coverage.
This book offers an original discussion of an element--water--and its relationship with people. In particular it shows how early medieval Italian soci...
