Interest in the medieval and early modern origins of so-called modern economic growth, especially as it was made manifest by the Industrial Revolution in Europe and its western off-shoots, has increased dramatically in the last two decades. As scholars have investigated more fully both the trajectory of productivity increases (finding them more gradual than once believed) and the institutional context (political and social) of industrial change, the need to understand the economic history of the centuries that preceded industrialization has become more urgent. As a result there has lately been a mini- publishing boom of scholarly works on the pre-modern social and economic history of Western Europe and England. For teachers of undergraduate courses in economic history, however, this boom had not yet translated into a single volume that could serve as a manageable introduction for students to either the core findings of medieval economic history or to the important questions of recent scholarly debates. Steven Epstein's new, and remarkably slender while also comprehensive, introductory textbook from Cambridge University Press is a most welcome remedy to this lacuna.
The scope of this work is ostensibly limited to late Medieval Europe, from the start of the millennium to 1500. However, Epstein actually begins his coverage with a very helpful discussion of economic conditions in late antiquity and looks forward at the close of the volume to the spectacular changes that were in store for Western Europe in the centuries that followed. Furthermore, he extends his geographic scope to include the findings of the important and relevant literature from the wider world of European contact. All of this is managed with a spare, but not insufficiently detailed, exposition of both the history and recent historiography of his core subject. For an introductory textbook, this volume is truly a remarkable achievement.
The book is organized around a mix of chronologically and thematically structured chapters. The early chapters focus on agriculture and the rural economy, the commercial economy, and the development of urban institutions prior to the Black Death. Like much of the economic historical literature surveyed by Epstein, he locates the pivot point of his narrative in the early to middle decades of the fourteenth century with a discussion of the numerous calamities that have come to dominate our understanding of that century. The chapters that follow to the close of the book cover the topics of technological change and the production of new consumer items, and the economic impact of war and social unrest. As a result of this organizational structure, it would be possible to use the book in its entirety to give students a chronological narrative of the development of the medieval economy. But it would also be possible to selectively use individual chapters as part of a specific unit designed around a particular theme in economic history. Moreover, each chapter has its own selective bibliography of readings that students could seek out for further information on the material covered or historiographical questions raised in that chapter.
One of the dangers of writing a slim textbook like this one is that the space one can devote to often tremendously complex debates in the scholarly literature is so limited as to force a simplistic or uniform narrative to the fore. Epstein mostly avoids this trap with frequent attention to the variation that was often more pronounced even across space than it was over time, the expected axis of difference in a work of history. For example, in a remarkably compact seven page introduction to feudal society, both in its so-called "first" and "second" manifestations, Epstein reminds his reader that the "dynamic to feudal society requires a patient attention to the issues of regionalism and chronology" (60). With a few well-placed examples, he does succeed in giving a broad definition of feudal society, while retaining the flexibility of seeing its multiple forms and trajectories. Another potentially contentious issue that he covers with admirable even-handedness is the origin and function of the craft guilds. Despite the fact that the dominance of guild records and organized craft work in most studies of medieval labor history has facilitated a general neglect of women's labor market activities (because women were only rarely admitted to guilds as full members), Epstein uses his discussion of the guilds precisely to introduce a substantive review of the nature and location of women's work.
There is one other controversy raised at length in this volume for which Epstein's discussion is less clear and his proposed solution is less amenable to this reader. That controversy is the vexed one about the true nature of the disease that appeared in Western Europe in 1348 causing mortality rates of up to 50% in some places and commonly known as the Black Death to historians and the public alike. Epstein correctly reports that there is serious disagreement among historians and epidemiologists alike about whether the bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) as understood in modern scientific analysis is the correct (or for that matter identical) agent to that which struck Europeans in the middle of the fourteenth century and subsequently until its equally mysterious disappearance in the seventeenth century. His general conclusion is that it was not, setting himself in alignment with the recent book by Samuel Cohn and apart from the majority of historians on this subject. To bring greater attention to this conviction he further decides to use the term "Big Death" to refer to the events of 1348-51 rather than the completely conventional Black Death. Indeed, even Samuel Cohn uses the standard terminology of Black Death, even while critiquing its conventional historiography. While I have no issue with Epstein's legitimate discussion of the many puzzles that remain unsolved in regard to the epidemiological question, the insistence on using a terminology that is both unfamiliar, and in my view, not persuasively helpful in bringing greater clarity to the underlying problems, is a detraction from an otherwise extremely balanced presentation.
This is a minor quibble, however. Those of us who teach undergraduate surveys in Medieval economic and social history are sure to become much indebted to Epstein for the comprehensive review of our subject matter so well treated in this very accessible book. And our students ought to be grateful as well, that it is neither too long, nor over- burdened by esoteric debates or mind-numbing detail. This is truly a volume that undergraduates will be able to read and hopefully digest, with handy and up-to-date references if they find that they desire to know more than what it is possible to cover here.