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Von Nowgorod bis London. Studien zu Handel, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Europa. Festschrift fur Stuart Jenks zum 60. Geburtstag

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gerhis/ghp037

1477-089X

Tim Scott,

Historical Economic and Legal Thought

The American scholar Stuart Jenks, long resident in Germany, is best known for his research on the Hansa and on medieval trade between the Baltic and England, with his multi-volume edition of the enrolled customs accounts preserved in the Public Record Office now being rolled out. But he has also written on the use of computing and the internet as aids to historical research, on outsiders in European cities, and on Franconian regional history. The twenty-two essays gathered in this festschrift reflect the huge span of Jenks's interests, but for readers of this journal it is the topics dealing with the Empire or the German-speaking lands which will be of immediate interest. Jürgen Sarnowsky explores the evidence for early signs of vigorous commercial activity in northern Italy in Ottonian times, and notes that it was Robert Lopez's ‘political particularism’ which stimulated commerce by competing lordships. John H. Munro, in a long essay replete with statistical tables, sums up a lifetime's concern for the woollen industry and trade of the Low Countries and England over nearly three centuries, by discussing the available range of archival sources, the various types of cloth (a much more complex issue than the tag of the ‘new draperies’ suggests), and the shifting patterns of trade. Herman van der Wee's study of the Antwerp labour market, ranging from the eleventh century to the eighteenth, can identify four distinct phases of growth or contraction, within which the much-invoked revolt against Spain and the sack of the city in the 1570s and 1580s caused only a temporary crisis of exports: the real decline in production came only after 1650. Rolf Hammel-Kiesow argues against received opinion that there was no appreciable difference between Upper German and Hanseatic merchants in terms of business organization, book-keeping practice, or the legal status of firms (though there certainly was over against the more advanced Italian merchants).