Introduction: Thinking about medieval Europeans in their natural world
Richard C. Hoffmann
How much were medieval Italians themselves responsible for the food shortage that by late spring 1347 was affecting about half population of Tuscany, onset summer in Sicily and Genoa an epidemic which would a few years kill or more European population, buildings smashed hundreds deaths Venice further northeast earthquake January 1348? Ought those events be related to unsurpassed flooding across central Europe July 1342, crash English grain yields 40 per cent normal 1348–52? Did spread exotic animal, rabbit, thirteenth-century England Low Countries have anything do with simultaneous extirpation native wild boar from Britain? And arrival fish, common carp, France at very time salmon vanishing streams coastal Normandy? Was any this change biodiversity connected classification beaver as fish?
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