With the efflorescence of palaeoscientific approaches to the past, historians have been confronted with a wealth of new evidence on both human and natural phenomena, from human disease and migration to landscape change and climate. These new data require a rewriting of our narratives of the past, questioning what constitutes an authoritative historical source and who is entitled to recount history to contemporary societies. Humanities-based historical inquiry must embrace this new evidence, but to do so historians need to engage with it critically, just as they do with textual and material sources. This article highlights the most vital methodological issues, ranging from the spatiotemporal scales and heterogeneity of the new evidence to the new roles attributed to quantitative methods and the place of scientific data in narrative construction. It considers areas of study where the palaeosciences have “intruded” into fields and subjects previously reserved for historians, especially socio-economic, climate, and environmental history. The authors argue that active engagement with new approaches is urgently needed if historians want to contribute to our evolving understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene.

This article analyzes the emergence of the paradigm of “piracy” and “fighting pirates” among the urban elites of the Hanse city of Lübeck in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While recent studies of maritime conflict management in this period have questioned the use of the term “piracy,” this study shows that towns such as Lübeck instrumentalized a discourse on “piracy” to criminalize and marginalize their competitors at a moment of structural economic change. A close reading of the records of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer, a guild of merchants trading to Norway, demonstrates how this concept was mobilized to justify actors’ own vio-lence as a struggle against so-called pirates and thus to stabilize group identities. The notion of “fighting pirates” gradually became a paradigm for urban elites like the Bergenfahrer, representing their social coherence as communities of violence.

This article discusses ab intestat succession within the Republic of Venice as a way to analyze the interaction between legal procedure and political economy. By focusing on those who died intestate on Venetian vessels, and contextualizing intestate succession rules within the political economy of the Republic, it argues for the importance of mobile wealth in both economic and social terms. In so doing, it discusses the ways in which regulations and procedures concerning intestate succession were designed to protect credit networks and trade interests, from the dealings of rich merchants to the small-scale transactions of seamen and seafarers, commenting also on how this affected their wives. The essay argues that Venice utilized reciprocity in these matters as a way to support its economic goals. Finally, it suggests how this documentary evidence can enable future research to reevaluate the material wealth and micro-entrepreneurial activities of seamen in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the commons in two broad regions of medieval southern Europe: northern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula’s Duero Plateau. Recent scholar-ship on different regions of northern Europe has highlighted the centrality of common lands to both agrosystems and the organization of communities, drawing on the economic theories of Elinor Ostrom and generally focusing on the early modern period. It has also suggested a contrast between resilient communities in northern Europe, where the presence of stable commons helped absorb social inequality, and those of southern Europe, where less solid commons supposedly resulted in lower cohesion among communities. Our longue-durée comparative study of these two regions shows, however, that commons existed in southern Europe from the early medieval period on. It also reveals how they evolved and adapted throughout the High and late Middle Ages, in tandem with the documentary practices that recorded them. This resilience took different forms in each of the areas studied, reflecting the influence of a range of different factors across southern Europe. The commons endured because they were part of a “moral economy” of collective use, which, in constant dialogue with notions of property and ownership, helped forge lasting identities in both rural and urban contexts and on different scales.

This paper applies to ancient Greece an approach developed by Pierre Rosanvallon: the integration of philosophical texts with the most everyday documents to better grasp a society’s understanding of its political life. For the ancient polis, this means focusing on the more pro-saic evidence offered by cities’ inscriptions, especially their collective decisions published on stone. It is used here to consider the changing ideas about the nature of political and private life—and especially the space between them. In a very influential model, Classical Athenian democrats and philosophers tended to insist on a sharp binary distinction between public/ political life and private life, leaving little room for a notion of an intermediate third space of polis life, similar to a “social sphere” or “civil society.” This pattern remained dominant in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but, especially after c. 150 BCE, some Greek citizens and intellectuals developed, above all in inscriptions, a much more explicit, complex, and subtle notion of “social life” as something between politics and private life. The article concludes by asking what the different ancient concepts discussed can contribute to current historiographical debates about the nature of the Greek city after c. 150 BCE, especially when it comes to moving beyond the traditional picture of “depoliticization.” It also calls into question the orthodox narrative of the development of ideas of “the social” over many centuries up to the present.

In contrast to other scientific renaissances, the culture forged in seventeenth-century Europe became an enduring phenomenon rather than dissipating within a few generations. In an effort to understand the persistence of European science, this article uses the case study of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to argue that men of letters played a crucial role in the legitimation of the nascent scientific movement. These men of letters enjoyed a social, intellectual, and aesthetic affinity with the “new science” and developed a narrative of scientific change that foregrounded the idea of a radical break with the past. They diffused this narrative among the cultural elite, mobilizing recent thinkers, discoveries, and scien-tific instruments as they participated in wide-ranging debates, regardless of whether they supported modern innovations or classical models. In so doing, they invented the narrative of a “scientific revolution,” a construction that has wielded a profound influence over the social and cultural history of European science.

In 1717, an anonymous petition to the king of Spain expressed concern about the excessive number of Muslims living in Cartagena (Murcia). This complaint prompted the Council of Castile to launch a survey of the Muslim population with the aim of clarifying their status. In addition to galley slaves, the inquiry focused in particular on libertinos, a little-known category of slaves who lived and worked freely in the city but were heavily indebted to their masters due to the sums owed for their ransom. This article reconstructs the condition of these unbound slaves, who lived apart from their masters’ households, and the tensions this provoked between competing systems of norms. On the one hand, the right of slaves to work to finance their own redemption, and that of their masters to live off the rents imposed on them, were deeply rooted in local custom. On the other, rising insecurity along the coast prompted local authorities and the Crown to restrict these overlapping rights by forcing masters to keep their slaves at home. At stake in this conflict between different slavery regimes, the one based on local law and the other on royal jurisdiction, were slaves’ access to the labor market and their right to free residency and the protections afforded by contract law. Finally, by placing the inquiry itself at the heart of the study, the article investigates the meaning of a procedure that was less a demographic enumeration of slaves than a redistribution of rights to the city among its Muslim inhabitants.