The idea of natural law, which has ancient roots in the Stoic philosophical heritage and in the Roman legal tradition, is the subject of a large and complex process of elaboration which starts in the end of the 11th century and goes up to the age of the great scholastic authors.

The book is concerned with arguably the single harshest subsistence crisis in Europe in the last two millennia: the Great Famine of 1315-17.

During recent decades, there has been a profound change in the way that researchers have read and interpreted the sources of the Middle Ages. This shift has prompted scholars to reconsider the historical value of the medieval cartularies. From Charters to Codex. Studies on Cartularies and Archival Memory in the Middle Ages