For many years, pioneer work has begun to uncover the history of mortality in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, before the Black Death. Nearly a hundred years ago, Creighton collected chronicle references to outbreaks of disease and mortality in his History ofepidemics in England.' In 1948 and 1966, J. C. Russell analysed the inquisitions post mortem to reveal patter...

The Order of the Holy Trinity for Redemption Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions redemption in late medieval England through prism order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against Weberian theory routinization charisma, it demons...

Scholars have debated the manner in which religious beliefs influence economic organization. This paper examines a particular case–the craft guilds of medieval England–to show how religious doctrines influence the ability of a group to enforce cooperation. When mortality rates are high, repeated interaction alone cannot sustain cooperation, but spiritual sanctions in the afterlife can sustain c...

Dental caries, a chronic infectious disease, affects more than 90 percent of all adults in the United States and over 80 percent of all adults in Korea. Historically, caries have been prevalent since the time of pre-Neolithic humans (10,000 BC) with a reported prevalence between 1.4% and 12.1% carious teeth, but it was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth century when a sharp increase in cari...

The new surgical texts of the thirteenth century suggest that their authors wished their subject to appear as a learned discipline, yet it was still communicated by individual practitioners privately to one or two disciples, not in a university setting. But by 1300, surgery was beginning to be taught formally as part of medicine in many Italian studia, for example, by Dino del Garbo at Siena, t...

The "hydraulic city" of Angkor, the capitol of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia, experienced decades-long drought interspersed with intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, in combination with other factors, contributed to its eventual demise. The climatic evidence comes from a seven-and-a-half century robust hydroclimate reconstruction from tropical southern Vietnamese tree...

In Sweden like in most of Europe the medieval expansion was followed by decline during the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Even though other factors may have contributed to the decline, a major cause was the plague pandemic, the Black Death, which reached Sweden in 1350. The first struck was followed by several recurring outbreaks, leading to population drop as well as social unrest. Differen...