Project Details
Projekt
Storage for subsistence. Regensburg´s hospital granary (17th - 19th centuries)
Applicant
Professor Dr. Mark Spoerer
Subject Area
Economic and Social History
Term
from 2015 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 275770760
In pre-modern economies, the provision of food was a pivotal economic task both at the individual and at the societal level. Given the importance of grain for the diet in central Europe, the management of grain storage was essential for subsistence. While we can quite easily observe the failure of such policies (which resulted in expensive grain purchases or hunger), it is usually difficult to observe grain storage policies directly. Even more difficult, and in most cases impossible due to the lack of sources, is to study the formation of economic expectations.The granary accounts of St Catherine´s hospital in Regensburg - a charity institution which had to guarantee constant food supply for more than 100 residents and employees - provide an excellent starting point for an analysis of grain storage policies from the late 17th century until the late 19th century. The comparison of granary documents with narrative evidence allows an empirical assessment of their success or failure in terms of food security which is also a test of the accuracy of (written) expectations. These accounts include monthly to weekly entries concerning the grain prices on the local market and the amounts of wheat, rye, barley and oat stored, sold or consumed from the hospital´s granary. In addition, there is a vast number of narrative sources concerning the hospital´s socio-economic situation over time. This density of data is absolutely unusual in a field that suffers from scattered source material. So far, neither the quantitative nor the qualitative sources have been used by historic research for an economic analysis. This unique data set will allow insights into the hospital´s grain storage policy, and as such, a micro study that goes deep into the hard-to-observe issue of interaction between experiences, expectation formation and economic behaviour. In particular we will ask whether the hospital had a storage policy and if so, whether and why it underwent significant changes over the course of time. Do these changes reflect the effect of market integration and (economic) learning? Do the hospital´s economic policies correspond to rational or adaptive expectations or to howsoever defined concepts of rationality? Can we find any traces of cognitive bias in the documents? Finally, since the hospital was a charity institution, in how far was the storage policy influenced by social and moral norms? And, for better or worse: Are we doing justice to the complexity of the subject by limiting our description of the hospital´s storage policy to modern concepts of expectations or rationality? The fact that this project reaches back into the early modern period might thus help to evaluate how far back modern concepts might be applied and to see which factors deviate and whether they were time-specific.
DFG Programme
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