The eight chapters in this book either assert or question the premise that the sixteenth century was the turning point during which the basic agricultural traditions and products of the European medieval world were replaced or superseded by those of the early modern world. The authors lean heavily toward archaeology--with a somewhat begrudging turn to the written sources of historical inquiry when they are extant and available--and the eight papers are basically field studies or detailed case studies set in a specific place and/or time, rather than general comments about large scale transition and innovation. The chapters take us over a good spread of Europe, touching on areas as varied as Bohemia, England, Sweden, and the Basque Country, and the wide distribution of the various authors’ academic bases and credentials (the authors identify as being based at the universities of Salento, Bari, Tubingen, Basel, Sheffield, Pilson, Bourgogne-Franche-Comte, Masaryk, and the Swedish Steel Production Association) reflects this extensive collaboration on a topic of considerable interest. That four of the eight papers are co-written by two or more authors likewise argues for the broad interest in the question of novelty and transition, particularly amidst the less exalted level of society and economic life.
In their introduction the volume’s editors point to the three major themes of the papers: land transformation and changes in land use, changes in agricultural patterns and animal husbandry, and technological change. And though they are unevenly distributed, the volume in toto has 79 figures and, article by article, extensive bibliographies in many languages, with many of the items cited pointing to work carried out and published in this century. Many of the arguments are supported by those detailed figures—maps, graphs, tables, etc.—though much of the illustrative and statistical material is well beyond the customary reading parameters and comprehension of a social historian (like this reviewer). The result is a collection of detailed case studies, as indicated above, with a precise data base and a narrow focus.
Ladislav Čapek looks at the changes in landholding patterns in sixteenth-century Bohemia, years in which a declining population and the desertion of many villages led to a landscape of larger estates and demesne farming and tenant labor services rather than individual peasant households. The decline in labor services meant a transfer to monetary rents as landlords, with larger holdings, grew more powerful and richer. Fishponds and game and hunting preserves were signs of this new landscape of deserted villages, all set in a rural world under scrutiny in the years between the devastation of the Hussite Wars of the fifteenth century and what was yet to befall the land in the Thirty Years War. Valentin Chevassu and five co-authors/researchers turn to a comparison of the landscape and its development in two mountainous areas in eastern France. The comparisons are between Morvan and Jura, assessing the importance of such factors as industrialization, deforestation (to feed industry and to clear the land), the shift to new crops and animal husbandry, and a growth in population. Of the two regions, Morvan was one of small hamlets, Jura of large villages and many new settlements, readily identifiable today by the presence of what were newly built churches. Overall, both areas were affected by the growth of Paris, with its demands for such commodities as wood both to build and to burn, alongside a pattern of industrialization over a wider area. And then, we are moved back to eastern Europe, as Jana Mazáčková and Petr Žaža deal with the topic of land use in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, with a reliance on aerial archaeology as well as on written sources. With an interest in how much land was needed to feed a household, we follow a tale of “the change of natural landscape into economic landscape” (96).
Having looked at work covering changes in the use and control or ownership of the land itself, we then turn to some papers that deal with what was grown on the land, both animal and vegetable. Tamsyn Fraser tackles the difficult question of the improvement of livestock and its links with the enclosure movement, focusing on post-medieval Buckinghamshire. Relying considerably on the remains of teeth and bones—rather than on written sources--she argues for the possibility of larger cattle, at least among those allowed to live to full growth, against a mixed record for sheep (as more were shorn to meet an ever-growing demand for woolen cloth). But these are tentative conclusions; “we don’t know” looms over the findings of an inquiry that runs up against the dilemma of so little reliable information. A comparative essay, authored by the volume’s co-editors, sets the tale of England’s livestock against those of the Basque Country. They offer a tale of mixed findings or of an up-and-down story: Basque cattle became larger and then shrank down again, whereas English cattle just seemed to grow, and similar findings, over time, mostly apply to sheep and pigs. Sources that enable us to respond to these questions are few and far between and much of the argument in this paper rests on sophisticated statistical presentations that are really for the eye of the specialist.
And then, for some balance regarding life in the fields, Anna Maria Grasso and her five co-authors discuss the question of whether broad beans (vicia faba) were becoming larger (and presumably more nutritious) over time. With attention usually focused on plants introduced from the New World, a good lesson is served by working to follow the fate and fortune of long-standing members of the European diet. Working from such scarce material as 152 seeds collected from five sites and discussed and classified by way of Welch’s ANOVA test of Equality of Means, we get data on length, width, and thickness of the beans. The conclusion argues for an increase in size, with selective breeding and a push toward biodiversity as major factors in the tale.
From the soil and what grew upon it we turn to two studies of technological innovation. Riina Rammo talks about changes in the rural textile craft, with Estonia as the center point of the discussion. Given that the cloth industry, in its many stages, was the major industrial complex of the pre-modern world—comparable perhaps to the role occupied today by the auto industry--transition from the vertical loom to the horizontal loom was a matter of considerable importance. Along with technological innovation and a greater use of the spinning wheel came a shift toward manorial production over that of the isolated household (and the vertical loom). Though the actual extant database is very limited—very little cloth survives from the sixteenth century--the argument for a better weave of woolen cloth seems a reasonable one. The other paper looking at technological innovation touches on the “diversification of the types of iron objects” in early modern Sweden (222). Given that we are focused on a region with 12,000 ore mining sites and 700 blast furnaces, new ideas and new ways of making and using metal tools and objects would hardly seem a surprise. Bigger, heavier, and more long-lasting agricultural plows and tools were developed to meet the need for more crops to feed more people.
In short, the editors’ introduction and the eight papers that follow give us a dense volume of detailed case studies. They offer no generalizations, other than the common argument that there was significant change in the face of rural agricultural life and development across the agricultural landscape in sixteenth-century Europe. This reticence about larger matters seems appropriate for a volume in a series entitled “History of Daily Life” and this particular entry highlights the small and often scrappy nature of the sources and of the complex inter-relationship of historical materials, field and archaeological findings, and sophisticated statistical and graphic presentations that bolster the arguments. For the historian of late medieval or early modern Europe much of the illustrative material is difficult to follow, relaying on “log ratio histograms” or a “box plot showing log ratios.” Unfortunately, many of the maps and diagrams are too small to examine, given the book’s small format, though they stand as witnesses to the validity of each author’s argument. Some of the terminology seems needlessly complex. Some of the prose would have profited from a bit of editing.
Criticisms aside: this is a volume of impressive case studies. They remind us of how even small and elusive bodies of data—both in written or physical form—can be woven into a pattern that is consonant with and enriches and amplifies more general statements of the topic. That the team of authors is such a wide-spread one, covering various academic fields of expertise to elucidate aspects of a large and general question, is testimony to how common problems can lead us to cross disciplines as well as those boundaries of time and of geography.