In 1966, Leopold Genicot wrote: "Crisis is the word which comes immediately to the historian's mind when he thinks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." I was wondering if the general view changed since then. Is the concept "crisis of the late middle ages" still used today? Or did its meaning change?
As I suggest in Are there any history books on the Late Middle Ages?, the historiography in Later Middle Ages (in Europe) has largely been divided on its connection either with the previous (medieval) or later (early modern) periodization, and the crisis narrative, intertwined with the possible impact of the Black Death (as well as the Great Famine), can still be the focus of their debate.
Compared with the trend of research of the 1960s and up to the 70s that agrarian history (and possible influence from the Marxian historiography as well as increasing use of statistics) was overwhelmingly predominant in socio-economic history, we can see some shifts within their grand narratives now, however, I suppose:
Study of religious mentality urges historians to approach the alleged 14th century crisis from more longer temporal framework. Obsession with the Death and changing religious mentality did not simply end with the Reformation in short-term, and we might also need to relativize the drastic contrast between the grim crisis and the shiny Italian Renaissance in the historiograhy. Some researchers heavily impressed by this shifting trend of research might prefer "transition" in more longer term to "crisis of the 14th century" in short-term in their analysis.
On the other hand, the adaption of interdisciplinary research or scientific method into the field of crisis narrative in Later Middle Ages has progressed very much in the last five decades since Genicot. We can now consider the problem of the possible relationship between the more unstable climate after the medieval climate anormaly (Medieval Warm Period) and alleged incidents related to the "Crisis" based on much more detailed materials than 50 years ago. While [Bauch and Schenk eds. 2020] conveniently (?) summarizes the current consensus of discussions in their collection of academic essays, [Campbell 2016] is an experimental work of synthesis of such trends, though it might still not be comparable with the synthesis on the so-called "17th century crisis" by Parker ([Parker 2013]).
The re-evaluation of the impact of the Black Death, with help of scientific research, might also be accelerated by the current Covid-19 outbreaks (Green 2020; Cf. Izdebski et al. 2022, though I suppose we'll be better to wait a bit more for the more through analysis especially on the latter's finding).
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