The measure of multitude population in medieval thought - Biller, Peter (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Includes bibliographical references (p. [421]-452) and indexes
Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction to medieval demographic thought -- PART 1. THE CHURCH AND GENERATION -- 2. Marriage and the Church's marriage-texts -- Appendix: Guide to Peter the Lombard's Four Books of Sentences -- 3. William of Auvergne -- 4. Equal or unequal numbers of men and women -- 5. The precept of marriage and sufficient multiplication -- 6. Avoidance of offspring (i): the general picture -- 7. Avoidance of offspring (ii): Canon law and Sentences commentaries -- 8. Avoidance of offspring (iii): the pastoral picture -- Appendix: William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis -- PART 2. THE MAP OF THE WORLD -- 9. Inhabitation of the world -- PART 3. ARISTOTLE AND MULTITUDE -- 10. Animals and life-span -- 11. The Politics (i): reception -- 12. The Politics (ii): age at marriage -- 13. The Politics (iii): multitude -- PART 4. THE LIGHT OF COMMON DAY -- 14. The bulging circuit of Florence -- Epigraph: The climate of thought
"By 1300 medieval men and women were beginning to measure multitude, counting, for example, numbers of boys and girls being baptized. Their mental capacity to grapple with population, to get its measure, was developing, and this book describes how medieval people thought about population through both the texts which contained their thought and the medieval realities which shaped it. They found many topics, such as the history of population and variations between polygamy, monogamy, and virginity, in theology. Crusade and travel literature supplied the themes of Muslim polygamy, military numbers, the colonization of the Holy Land, and the populations of Mongolia and China. Translations of Aristotle provided not only new themes and but also a new vocabulary with which to think about population." "In this new study Peter Biller challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He investigates medieval thought's capacity to deal with concrete contemporary realities, and sets academic discussions of population alongside the medieval facts of 'birth, and copulation, and death'."--Publisher description