Search results for ""Author Ben Dodds""

This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.

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Numerous aspects of the medieval economy are covered in this new collection of essays, from business fraud and changes in wages to the production of luxury goods. Long dominated by theories of causation involving class conflict and Malthusian crisis, the field of medieval economic history has been transformed in recent years by a better understanding of the process of commercialisation. Inrecognition of the important work in this area by Richard Britnell, this volume of essays brings together studies by historians from both sides of the Atlantic on fundamental aspects of the medieval commercial economy. From examinations of high wages, minimum wages and unemployment, through to innovative studies of consumption and supply, business fraud, economic regulation, small towns, the use of charters, and the role of shipmasters and peasants as entrepreneurs, this collection is essential reading for the student of the medieval economy. Contributors: John Hatcher, John Langdon, Derek Keene, John S. Lee, James Davis, Mark Bailey, Christine M. Newman, Peter L. Larson, Maryanne Kowaleski, Martha Carlin, James Masschaele, Christopher Dyer

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