The New Middle Ages

The economic and social history of medieval England has been a notably animated scene for more than thirty years, since M. M. Postan provided a powerful model of surging growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, catastrophic demographic crisis in the fourteenth, and economic stagnation in the fifteenth.1 The historiography of the period is rich and varied; the academic debates lively and productive; the field crowded with textbooks; and the topic still attractive to students despite the collapse of economic and social history as a departmentally distinctive discipline. In the end, the fact that Postan's view of a complex society over a whole four centuries can be boiled down to such a simple proposition was always going to make him a sitting duck. While his view of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has remained substantially intact, for the period after the Black Death of 1348–9 he has come under sustained fire from every side and all calibres of weaponry, providing target practice for rural and urban historians alike, and for the empirically rich as readily as for the theoretically informed. Christopher Dyer's new book now takes the whole topic significantly further forward by delineating a new picture of the later Middle Ages in England to replace the mutilated carcass of the old.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Economic history · Fifteenth · Historiography · Middle Ages · Period (music) · Proposition · Dengue and Mosquito Control Research · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

• Lords and peasants in a changing society

  Christopher Dyer•Lords and peasants in a changing…•1980

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• A Medieval Capital and Its Grain Supply

  George Grantham, Bruce M S Campbell et al.•The Economic History Review•1995

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• Canterbury Cathedral Priory

  E Miller, R A L Smith•The Economic History Review•1944

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• The Estates of the Percy Family 1416-1537

  T B Pugh, J M W Bean et al.•The Economic History Review•1960

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