This volume aims at taking the first steps towards a revaluation of urban historiography in Northwest Europe, including rather than excluding texts that do not fit common definitions.

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

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.