Professor John Munro passed away on December 23, 2013. This site is maintained and kept online as an archive. For more infomation please visit the Centre for Medieval Studies

Professor John H. Munro
Department of Economics
University of Toronto
150 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G7
CANADA

ECONOMICS 2210Y: Topics in the Economic and Social History of Later Medieval and Renaissance Europe, c.1250 - c.1600

See the Robarts Library - ERES web link to this course, and to related sites.

Selected seminar topics in the economic and social history of later medieval and Renaissance Europe, including, inter alia:

demography, marriage and family structures; agriculture, feudalism, manorialism, and serfdom; the role of the Church, state, and the military structures; money, credit, and prices; regional and international commerce, banking, and finance; manufacturing industries, the textile trades, urban economies, and craft guilds; labour conditions (urban and rural), income distributions, living standards; social and economic philosophies found in medieval society.

Seminar Presentations: Oral Reports

a) For each seminar topic (see appended list) there will be issued, at least a week in advance, a one page bibliography, with a list of questions, to organize both the reading and the seminar discussion. For each major topic, a complete bibliography, with tables, graphs, maps, etc. will also be issued.

b) The seminar format is flexible and may depend on the nature of the topics. For some topics, two or more students may be asked to give a report that answers a specific question on the reading list; or several students may be asked to comment upon specific assigned readings; for other topics, two students may be asked to engage in a debate, one defending and the other opposing some major thesis in a current debate; or, more rarely, one student may be called upon to conduct the entire seminar, introducing it with a major report on the readings. Some students may also be called upon to comment upon the oral presentations given by fellow students.

c) The actual assignments will be drawn from these lists, usually from the asterisked items (*); and the amount to be read will certainly not be unreasonable or in any way onerous: about one or two journal articles (or book chapters) a week.

d) Though the introductory topics on demography, agrarian society, money & prices, and the role of the Church will be mandatory, the rest will be chosen collectively by the members of the seminar from the master-list of topics. Some topics may require more than one session (generally with the consent of the seminar).


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