Daniel R Curtis
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 198352 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Daniel R Curtis |
| NOMBRES | Daniel R |
| APELLIDO | Curtis |
| FIRMA | CURTIS D R |
| AFILIACIONES | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8355-4153 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 120 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2012 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Epidemic Mortality and Redistribution of Housing Wealth in Leiden, 1632–68
How did epidemic mortality affect housing wealth in the pre-industrial period? Using new data on house ownership and variation in street-level mortality in seventeenth-century Leiden, we show that although epidemic mortality targeted poor streets where residents were typically tenants and not owners, these outbreaks still increased the turnover of houses. Ordinarily, turnover was higher in owner-occupied housing sectors, while epidemics created m…
Household, family, and community responses to the direct costs of epidemics
Plague and Epidemic Disease in the Northern Parts of the Low Countries, 1349-1450
This article reviews what we know about plague and other epidemic diseases in the northern Low Countries before 1450 – the evidence, its limitations, and its implications. I make three observations. First, sources suggest that the Black Death was severe in central inland areas, although we lack conclusive evidence for its impact in the county of Holland. Second, the recurring epidemics occurring in the northern Low Countries were often severe – i…
Lifecycle land decumulation strategies in a seventeenth-century rural community
Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth-century village in th…
Adam Sundberg. Natural Disasters and the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
Journal Article Adam Sundberg. Natural Disasters and the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age: Floods, Worms, and the Cattle Plague Get access Adam Sundberg. Natural Disasters and the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age: Floods, Worms, and the Cattle Plague. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 337. Cloth $120.00. Daniel R. Curtis Daniel R. Curtis Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-…
Estimating warfare-related civilian mortality in the early modern period
Early modern warfare in Western Europe exposed civilian populations to violence, hardship, and disease. Despite limited empirical evidence, the ensuing mortality effects are regularly invoked by economic historians to explain patterns of economic development. Using newly collected data on adult burials and war events in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, we estimate early modern war-driven mortality in localities close to military activity. W…
Cinematic Representation of Early Modern Women and Epidemics
I n many different types of films produced across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have depicted epidemics, women have been visualized according to two recurring characteristic images.On the one hand, women have been portrayed as actual or symbolic "carriers" or "spreaders" of disease-sometimes as a punishment for perceived immorality-and usually connected to female characters deviating from the gender roles prescribed during epidemi…
Epidemics, public health workers, and ‘heroism’ in cinematic perspective
During COVID-19, acts of ‘heroism’ – particularly by ordinary people ‘from below’ – have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. By analysing examples from a large corpus of films about epidemics across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, this article investigates how cinema has represented public health workers. We find that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be elite …
Mark Bailey, After the Black Death
From One Mortality Regime to Another? Mortality Crises in Late Medieval Haarlem, Holland, in Perspective
This article employs a large database of 10,360 deaths taken from registrations of graves dug and church bells tolled at Haarlem between the years 1412 and 1547—one of the largest samples and longest series of mortality evidence ever produced for medieval Holland—and systematically compares findings with a seventeenth-century burial register for the same city. It concludes that we should put aside any lingering notion that late medieval Holland w…
The Female Burden Visualized
TREATING PATIENTS in a hospital and of female medical workers visibly distressed as their heads are shaved in China during the COVID-19 outbreak have brought into the sharp focus the gendered dimensions of epidemic disease outbreaks. In many parts of the world during this pandemic, the majority of "front line" "key workers" in food sales, health and social care, and education and childcare are women. Both scholarly literature from disaster studie…
The Female Experience of Epidemics in the Early Modern Low Countries
Recent literature has argued that women in parts of the early \nmodern Low Countries experienced high levels of ‘agency’ and \n‘independence’ – measured through ages and rates of marriage, \nparticipation in economic activities beyond the household, and the \nphysical occupation of collective or public spaces. Epidemic disease \noutbreaks, however, also help bring into focus a number of female \nburdens and hardships in the early modern Low Count…
Infectious Inequalities
This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, …
Suspicious minds
One key factor that appears to be crucial in the rejection of quarantines, isolation and other social controls during epidemic outbreaks is trust-or rather distrust. Much like news reporting and social media, popular culture such as fictional novels, television shows and films can influence people's trust, especially given that the information provided about an epidemic disease is sometimes seen as grounded in 'scientific fact' by societies. As w…
The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled datab…
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Climate and society in long‐term perspective
Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as accepted knowledge. We demonstrate pitfalls in the content, use and interpretation of historical dat…
The escape from famine in the Northern Netherlands
A long historiography has concluded that the Northern Netherlands was famine free by the seventeenth century. However, this view has been established on limited grain price data and an unclear chronology, lacking a broader comparative perspective, and relying heavily on the explanation that Amsterdam was the centre point of the international grain trade. Using newly compiled burials data for the Northern and Southern Netherlands and Northern Fran…
D agomar D egroot . The Frigid Golden Age
Over the past few years, the climate has come to be seen as a significant agent of historical developments. A plethora of recent studies have drawn connections between various kinds of climatic fluctuations and outbreaks of human conflict throughout history. In line with research linking contemporary climate change and outbreaks of epidemic disease, scholars are suggesting that plague dynamics of the past were closely associated with particular c…
The 'light touch' of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands
Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a 'light touch' of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Bla…
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
The sex‐selective impact of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349–1450
Although recent work has begun to establish that early modern plagues had selective mortality effects, it was generally accepted that the initial outbreak of Black Death in 1347-52 was a "universal killer." Recent bioarchaeological work, however, has argued that the Black Death was also selective with regard to age and pre-plague health status. The issue of the Black Death's potential sex selectivity is less clear. Bioarchaeological research hypo…
Danger and Displacement in the Dollard
It has frequently been shown that, after severe floods in the pre-industrial period, property within the afflicted rural society often became redistributed more inequitably. This is often seen to be because small farmers did not have the resources to buffer exceptional losses. This article looks at an episode of crisis that occurred in the region of Northeast Groningen (the Netherlands) close to the Dollard Sea - the breakthrough of a key dike in…
History and the Social Sciences
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record …
Was Plague an Exclusively Urban Phenomenon? Plague Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries
Current scholarship reinforces the notion that by the early modern period, plague had become largely an urban concern in northwestern Europe. However, a data set comprised of burial information from the seventeenth-century Low Countries suggests that plague's impact on the countryside was far more severe and pervasive than heretofore supposed
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Medieval land reclamation and the creation of new societies
The sex‐selective impact of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349–1450
Although recent work has begun to establish that early modern plagues had selective mortality effects, it was generally accepted that the initial outbreak of Black Death in 1347-52 was a "universal killer." Recent bioarchaeological work, however, has argued that the Black Death was also selective with regard to age and pre-plague health status. The issue of the Black Death's potential sex selectivity is less clear. Bioarchaeological research hypo…
Was Plague an Exclusively Urban Phenomenon? Plague Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries
Current scholarship reinforces the notion that by the early modern period, plague had become largely an urban concern in northwestern Europe. However, a data set comprised of burial information from the seventeenth-century Low Countries suggests that plague's impact on the countryside was far more severe and pervasive than heretofore supposed
Florence and its hinterlands in the late Middle Ages
A key strand of research for social and economic historians of the pre-industrial period is the relationship between city and countryside. Sometimes urban and rural environments enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships, though in other cases cities reduced their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay – the question is, why? By focusing on late-medieval Florence and Tuscany, this paper moves away from approaching this question through an ‘urban b…
The 'light touch' of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands
Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a 'light touch' of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Bla…
Is there an ‘agro-town’ model for Southern Italy? Exploring the diverse roots and development of the agro-town structure through a comparative case study in Apulia
Large, concentrated settlements known as ‘agro-towns’ abound across Southern Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. The prevalence and persistence of these settlements are very curious but not yet well understood. Initially, scholars interpreted their development as stemming from Southern Italy's economic and social ‘backwardness’ and inequality. This view has now been challenged by scholarship which emphasises that the pre-industrial Mezzog…
The Emergence of Concentrated Settlements in Medieval Western Europe
There is now a general scholarly consensus that the concentration of rural people into settlements in Western Europe (as opposed to dispersed or scattered habitations across the countryside) occurred in various stages between the eighth and twelfth centuries, though with regional divergences in precise timing, speed, formation, and intensity. What is clear from the literature is that a “one-size fits all” model for settlement development across W…
The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled datab…
Danger and Displacement in the Dollard
It has frequently been shown that, after severe floods in the pre-industrial period, property within the afflicted rural society often became redistributed more inequitably. This is often seen to be because small farmers did not have the resources to buffer exceptional losses. This article looks at an episode of crisis that occurred in the region of Northeast Groningen (the Netherlands) close to the Dollard Sea - the breakthrough of a key dike in…
Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from acrossWesternEurope, 1300-1800
The view of the commons as archaic, 'backward' and 'irrational' institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies inWesternEurope. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in th…
An Agro-Town Bias? Re-examining the Micro-Demographic Model for Southern Italy in the Eighteenth Century
Over the past 25 years, there has been an orthodox view established that 18thcentury Southern Italy had a distinctive micro-demographic model based around a number of facets, 3 key ones being a proliferation of neo-local small nuclear households, an exceptionally low average age of first marriage for women (with low levels of life-time singles), and a low incidence of household service. This view, however, has been forged on the back of geographi…
From One Mortality Regime to Another? Mortality Crises in Late Medieval Haarlem, Holland, in Perspective
This article employs a large database of 10,360 deaths taken from registrations of graves dug and church bells tolled at Haarlem between the years 1412 and 1547—one of the largest samples and longest series of mortality evidence ever produced for medieval Holland—and systematically compares findings with a seventeenth-century burial register for the same city. It concludes that we should put aside any lingering notion that late medieval Holland w…
The Female Experience of Epidemics in the Early Modern Low Countries
Recent literature has argued that women in parts of the early \nmodern Low Countries experienced high levels of ‘agency’ and \n‘independence’ – measured through ages and rates of marriage, \nparticipation in economic activities beyond the household, and the \nphysical occupation of collective or public spaces. Epidemic disease \noutbreaks, however, also help bring into focus a number of female \nburdens and hardships in the early modern Low Count…
The escape from famine in the Northern Netherlands
A long historiography has concluded that the Northern Netherlands was famine free by the seventeenth century. However, this view has been established on limited grain price data and an unclear chronology, lacking a broader comparative perspective, and relying heavily on the explanation that Amsterdam was the centre point of the international grain trade. Using newly compiled burials data for the Northern and Southern Netherlands and Northern Fran…
Estimating warfare-related civilian mortality in the early modern period
Early modern warfare in Western Europe exposed civilian populations to violence, hardship, and disease. Despite limited empirical evidence, the ensuing mortality effects are regularly invoked by economic historians to explain patterns of economic development. Using newly collected data on adult burials and war events in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, we estimate early modern war-driven mortality in localities close to military activity. W…
Suspicious minds
One key factor that appears to be crucial in the rejection of quarantines, isolation and other social controls during epidemic outbreaks is trust-or rather distrust. Much like news reporting and social media, popular culture such as fictional novels, television shows and films can influence people's trust, especially given that the information provided about an epidemic disease is sometimes seen as grounded in 'scientific fact' by societies. As w…
The impact of land accumulation and consolidation on population trends in the pre-industrial period
From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not…
Plague and Epidemic Disease in the Northern Parts of the Low Countries, 1349-1450
This article reviews what we know about plague and other epidemic diseases in the northern Low Countries before 1450 – the evidence, its limitations, and its implications. I make three observations. First, sources suggest that the Black Death was severe in central inland areas, although we lack conclusive evidence for its impact in the county of Holland. Second, the recurring epidemics occurring in the northern Low Countries were often severe – i…
Lifecycle land decumulation strategies in a seventeenth-century rural community
Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth-century village in th…
The Female Burden Visualized
TREATING PATIENTS in a hospital and of female medical workers visibly distressed as their heads are shaved in China during the COVID-19 outbreak have brought into the sharp focus the gendered dimensions of epidemic disease outbreaks. In many parts of the world during this pandemic, the majority of "front line" "key workers" in food sales, health and social care, and education and childcare are women. Both scholarly literature from disaster studie…
Infectious Inequalities
This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, …
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
Florence and its hinterlands in the late Middle Ages
A key strand of research for social and economic historians of the pre-industrial period is the relationship between city and countryside. Sometimes urban and rural environments enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships, though in other cases cities reduced their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay – the question is, why? By focusing on late-medieval Florence and Tuscany, this paper moves away from approaching this question through an ‘urban b…
Tine de Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her theoretical framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for collective management of resources
Tine De Moor has developed a bold and robust scholarly framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for 'corporate collective action' in her 'Silent Revolution' article of 2008; the significance of which may serve to be the foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come. However, as revealed in this review piece, there are some fundamental flaws in the framework, which need to be ironed out first. There remains a probl…
Tine de Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her theoretical framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for collective management of resources
Tine De Moor has developed a bold and robust scholarly framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for 'corporate collective action' in her 'Silent Revolution' article of 2008; the significance of which may serve to be the foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come. However, as revealed in this review piece, there are some fundamental flaws in the framework, which need to be ironed out first. There remains a probl…
Medieval land reclamation and the creation of new societies
Is there an ‘agro-town’ model for Southern Italy? Exploring the diverse roots and development of the agro-town structure through a comparative case study in Apulia
Large, concentrated settlements known as ‘agro-towns’ abound across Southern Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. The prevalence and persistence of these settlements are very curious but not yet well understood. Initially, scholars interpreted their development as stemming from Southern Italy's economic and social ‘backwardness’ and inequality. This view has now been challenged by scholarship which emphasises that the pre-industrial Mezzog…
The Emergence of Concentrated Settlements in Medieval Western Europe
There is now a general scholarly consensus that the concentration of rural people into settlements in Western Europe (as opposed to dispersed or scattered habitations across the countryside) occurred in various stages between the eighth and twelfth centuries, though with regional divergences in precise timing, speed, formation, and intensity. What is clear from the literature is that a “one-size fits all” model for settlement development across W…
The impact of land accumulation and consolidation on population trends in the pre-industrial period
From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not…
An Agro-Town Bias? Re-examining the Micro-Demographic Model for Southern Italy in the Eighteenth Century
Over the past 25 years, there has been an orthodox view established that 18thcentury Southern Italy had a distinctive micro-demographic model based around a number of facets, 3 key ones being a proliferation of neo-local small nuclear households, an exceptionally low average age of first marriage for women (with low levels of life-time singles), and a low incidence of household service. This view, however, has been forged on the back of geographi…
Danger and Displacement in the Dollard
It has frequently been shown that, after severe floods in the pre-industrial period, property within the afflicted rural society often became redistributed more inequitably. This is often seen to be because small farmers did not have the resources to buffer exceptional losses. This article looks at an episode of crisis that occurred in the region of Northeast Groningen (the Netherlands) close to the Dollard Sea - the breakthrough of a key dike in…
History and the Social Sciences
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record …
Was Plague an Exclusively Urban Phenomenon? Plague Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries
Current scholarship reinforces the notion that by the early modern period, plague had become largely an urban concern in northwestern Europe. However, a data set comprised of burial information from the seventeenth-century Low Countries suggests that plague's impact on the countryside was far more severe and pervasive than heretofore supposed
Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from acrossWesternEurope, 1300-1800
The view of the commons as archaic, 'backward' and 'irrational' institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies inWesternEurope. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in th…
The sex‐selective impact of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349–1450
Although recent work has begun to establish that early modern plagues had selective mortality effects, it was generally accepted that the initial outbreak of Black Death in 1347-52 was a "universal killer." Recent bioarchaeological work, however, has argued that the Black Death was also selective with regard to age and pre-plague health status. The issue of the Black Death's potential sex selectivity is less clear. Bioarchaeological research hypo…
Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards
van Bavel, B., D. R. Curtis, and T. Soens. 2018. Economic inequality and institutional adaptation in response to flood hazards: a historical analysis. Ecology and Society 23(4):30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10491-230430
Climate and society in long‐term perspective
Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as accepted knowledge. We demonstrate pitfalls in the content, use and interpretation of historical dat…
The escape from famine in the Northern Netherlands
A long historiography has concluded that the Northern Netherlands was famine free by the seventeenth century. However, this view has been established on limited grain price data and an unclear chronology, lacking a broader comparative perspective, and relying heavily on the explanation that Amsterdam was the centre point of the international grain trade. Using newly compiled burials data for the Northern and Southern Netherlands and Northern Fran…
D agomar D egroot . The Frigid Golden Age
Over the past few years, the climate has come to be seen as a significant agent of historical developments. A plethora of recent studies have drawn connections between various kinds of climatic fluctuations and outbreaks of human conflict throughout history. In line with research linking contemporary climate change and outbreaks of epidemic disease, scholars are suggesting that plague dynamics of the past were closely associated with particular c…
The 'light touch' of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands
Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a 'light touch' of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Bla…
Suspicious minds
One key factor that appears to be crucial in the rejection of quarantines, isolation and other social controls during epidemic outbreaks is trust-or rather distrust. Much like news reporting and social media, popular culture such as fictional novels, television shows and films can influence people's trust, especially given that the information provided about an epidemic disease is sometimes seen as grounded in 'scientific fact' by societies. As w…
The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled datab…
Disasters and History
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but…
Cinematic Representation of Early Modern Women and Epidemics
I n many different types of films produced across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have depicted epidemics, women have been visualized according to two recurring characteristic images.On the one hand, women have been portrayed as actual or symbolic "carriers" or "spreaders" of disease-sometimes as a punishment for perceived immorality-and usually connected to female characters deviating from the gender roles prescribed during epidemi…
Epidemics, public health workers, and ‘heroism’ in cinematic perspective
During COVID-19, acts of ‘heroism’ – particularly by ordinary people ‘from below’ – have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. By analysing examples from a large corpus of films about epidemics across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, this article investigates how cinema has represented public health workers. We find that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be elite …
Mark Bailey, After the Black Death
From One Mortality Regime to Another? Mortality Crises in Late Medieval Haarlem, Holland, in Perspective
This article employs a large database of 10,360 deaths taken from registrations of graves dug and church bells tolled at Haarlem between the years 1412 and 1547—one of the largest samples and longest series of mortality evidence ever produced for medieval Holland—and systematically compares findings with a seventeenth-century burial register for the same city. It concludes that we should put aside any lingering notion that late medieval Holland w…
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