Manors And Markets

Exploring the Low Countries at a regional level, van Bavel highlights the importance of localized structures for determining the nature of social transitions and economic growth.

The Low Countries — an area roughly embracing the present-day Netherlands and Belgium — formed a patchwork of varied economic and social development in the Middle Ages, with some regions displaying a remarkable dynamism. Manors and Markets charts the history of these vibrant economies and societies, and contrasts them with alternative paths of development, from the early medieval period to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Providing a concise overview of social and economic changes over more than a thousand years, Bas van Bavel assesses the impact of the social and institutional organization that saw the Low Countries become the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. By delving into the early and high medieval history of society, van Bavel uncovers the foundations of the flourishing of the medieval Flemish towns and the forces that propelled Holland towards its Golden Age. Exploring the Low Countries at a regional level, van Bavel highlights the importance of localized structures for determining the nature of social transitions and economic growth. He assesses the role of manorial organization, the emergence of markets, the rise of towns, the quest for self-determination by ordinary people, and the sharp regional differences in development that can be observed in the very long run. In doing so, the book offers a significant contribution to the debate about the causes of economic and social change, both past and present.

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual impact between nature and culture, Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people defined their identities, encouraging them to view themselves as belonging to specific landscapes. The book offers close readings of love songs, pastourelles, motets, and rondets from the likes of Gace Brulé, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut, and many others. Saltzstein shows how their music-text relationships illuminate the ways in which song helped to foster identities tied to specific landscapes among the knightly classes, the clergy, aristocratic women, and peasants. By connecting social types to topographies, trouvère songs and the manuscripts in which they were preserved presented models of identity for later generations of songwriters, performers, listeners, patrons, and readers to emulate, thereby projecting into the future specific ways of being on the land. Written in the long thirteenth century during the last major era of climate change, trouvère songs, as Saltzstein demonstrates, shape our understanding of how identity formation has rested on relationships between nature, culture, and change.

P.D.A. Harvey is a historian of medieval rural England with a wide interest in the history of cartography; this collection of his essays brings together both these strands. It first looks at the English countryside from the 10th century to the 15th, investigating problems in particular documents, in the village community and in underlying long-term changes. How landlords drew profits from their property in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, how and why there followed changes in the way landed estates were run and in the written records they produced, what new light their personal seals can throw on medieval peasants, are all among the topics discussed, while the local management of large estates and the development of the peasant land market are themes that recur throughout. There follow essays on the way maps were brought into the management of landed estates in the 16th and 17th centuries, starting with the introduction of consistent scale into mapping, a new concept crucially important in the general history of topographical maps. The collection closes by looking at some of the traps that both documents and maps set for the historian of the English countryside.

First published in 1986. The free market is often associated with liberty and individualism, and this connection has been made for more centuries than is generally realised. This essays collected in this book trace the development, importance and influence of the market as a dominating component of the shared human life from classical antiquity to the present. The authors, from various backgrounds, keep constantly in view the moral and political questions raised by the role of markets, as well as laying out succinctly what can be known or deduced about the actual operation of the market in Western and other cultures. This book will be of interest to students of economics and history.

The Seminoles once roamed the land that encompasses Wilton Manors, until Henry Flagler brought his East Coast Railway through the untamed wilderness in the late nineteenth century. By 1910, the railway had transformed the area into a viable farming and shipping hamlet known as Colohatchee, until a wealthy businessman began marketing the plot of land nestled between the North and South branches of the Middle River as a beautiful bedroom suburb of Fort Lauderdale. The 1926 housing market crash in south Florida, paired with a devastating hurricane brought an end to this dream one that wouldn't be revived until after WWII. Join local author Ben Little and the Wilton Manors Historical Society as they chronicle the history of this incredible town, from its humble roots to the thriving urban community it is today.