🚀 go-pugleaf

[jelkind@ruby.berkeley.edu.UUCP ]
>to make his point he  tends  to  oversimplify  and  even  "fudge"
>things  just  a  little. He's not lying, mind you, but. . . well,
>take this example. In one essay, he  argues  that  moveable  type
>printing  arose in part to the shortage of clerks after the Black
>Death. But moveable type wasn't invented for a century after  the
>Black  Death!  What  did  people do for clerks in the intervening
>hundred-odd years? And surely the population of Europe would have
>been  beginning to rebound in a century. So, while James Burke is
>entertaining and interesting, what he says should not necessarily
>taken as gospel.
>					Richard Schultz

I agree about Burke; but the particular conjecture on  population
is, I believe, wrong. The population of Europe kept falling for a
century after the Black Death. It fell by perhaps a third in  the
Black  Death  itself, but it probably fell by something like *two
thirds* during the next century. The  main  cause  was  that  the
plague  returned  every  few years as population not immune to it
accumulated. Among other causes were birthrate decline, change in
mores making for less hygiene, and other epidemics.

(Recommended source: The Black Death, by Robert S. Gottfried,
Free Press, New York).

Richard Schultz's argument above still holds:  Europe  must  have
accomodated  somehow  to  the immediate shortage of clerks in the
14th century, and the gradual depopulation may not have  anything
to  do  with the printing problem. Burke does stretch points; the
value of his method lies, I believe,  not  in  discovering  *the*
true  causal  connection  between  facts,  but in indicating what
*kinds* of connection exist. It is half history, half thought
experiment (aka fiction).

		Jan Wasilewsky