Abstract
That the inhabitants of the Frankish kingdoms in the later eighth and early ninth centuries were regularly hit by famines is not news to anybody who has read the chronicles and histories of the period. In this book, Jean-Pierre Devroey takes four of these famines as his starting-point for a wide-ranging exploration that takes the reader to sometimes surprising fields of neighbouring research (entomology, dendrochronology, Napoleonic France). Unlike older scholarship, which explained famines either via Malthusian cycles, inadequate agricultural techniques or as natural phenomena, Devroey considers hunger as a social phenomenon caused by human agency, but determined by natural causes. The focus of his research is therefore two-fold: firstly, the natural and climatological circumstances that led to famine, and, secondly, the way in which people imagined and dealt with such disasters. The author allows himself many digressions that sometimes obscure the main line of his arguments, but the book is...
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