This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.

Artikeln diskuterar några bilder i en medeltida laghandskrift från 1430 och argumenterar för att dessa har en delvis annan syn på kvinnans ställning än den patriarkala som dominerade tiden

We argue that a dense network covered Eurasia in the fifteenth century, and that one should not just look at the major traderoutes - we also claim that Amercia was within reach for a long time before c 1500 from Europe, but the focus and interest of the West was directed eastwards

The period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries was one of rising population and increasing pressure on land and resources. Access to land per person and per household declined as peasant arable holdings were fragmented to make room for this growing population, and an increasing proportion of the population was left reliant on smallholdings from which to earn a living. How so many people were able to live off of so little land is a crucial problem in our understanding of the high and late medieval economy. Through examination of illuminated manuscripts, religious iconography, archaeological findings and written records, we identify a series of agricultural techniques, well suited to the growing number smallholding peasants, and argue that peasants were able to achieve high levels of land productivity through the labour-intensive use of small-scale technologies.