Questions for Economy Section

Questions about the Economy and Daily Life:

Life span?  (Demographics generally - birth rate, etc.) (The Ties that Bound - book)

Balance of Peasants and Serfs influencing credit, banking, markets, financial instutions?

Interactions between banks and states (how much power could credit command?)

Individuals who played/practiced music - what roll did they play in society?  What defined their roll in the arts?  (How were arts portrayed - division of high/low?  relationship to the church or court?)

    (try troubador culture - Abbott Suger - also try the "Seven Liberal Arts")

General educational opportunities available in any given time and place?  Court schools under Charlemagne, Beginning of Universities, secular education in the late medieval period.

     (By extension, who learned to read and how - wealth, access,etc.)

Discresionary spending - states and individuals, wealthy consumption (Book on consumption?? - mediterranean shelf)

How did the levels of economic productivity change over time?  "Putting Out System."

     Division of labor, etc.
     How does productivity increase?  Relation of technology or worker efficiency to output.

     Divisions of labor into service, agriculture, production of goods, government, finance, military (Read the opening lines - about 30 - of Piers the Plowman C text).

Stability of Currency

Peasant access to credit, savings, monetary exchange

     (Existence of retail banking and for who)

Functioning of the Viking economy?  Northern European development - especially the relationship of Eastern Europe. (perhaps starting even in late Rome - Rome's relationship to the deep north.)

How were Barbarian and Roman economic practices merged or adapted?

Were state governments reliant on war as part of their economy?

    (Functioning of the Royal Fisc?)

Vernacular languages - how and why do they develop?

     (Interactions between Latin and Germanic languages create a border in movement or trade?)

Economic interactions between the Ottomans and Western Europe?  Importance of the Ottoman's in the economic life of the Mediterranean generally?  (Hilal Inalcik - author of many things...)

What effect did day to day trade have on regional development (the relationship of fairs to long distance trade?)  - Research the Fairs of Champagne in particular.

Historiography of Feudalism (Naval gazing) 

   (Marc Bloch through Bisson along with Brown "Tyranny of a Construct")

Last modified: Monday, November 11, 2013, 2:33 PM