Storage for subsistence. Regensburg´s hospital granary (17th - 19th centuries)

储存以维持生计。

• 批准号: 275770760
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Mark Spoerer
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/275770760?language=en
• 关键词: Storage; subsistence.; Regensburg; hospital; granary

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.

在前现代经济中，无论是在个人层面还是在社会层面，提供食物都是一项关键的经济任务。考虑到谷物在中欧饮食中的重要性，谷物储存的管理对维持生计至关重要。虽然我们可以很容易地观察到这些政策的失败（导致昂贵的粮食购买或饥饿），但通常很难直接观察到粮食储存政策。更困难的是，在大多数情况下，由于缺乏资源，研究经济预期的形成是不可能的。雷根斯堡圣凯瑟琳医院（St Catherine’s hospital）是一家慈善机构，必须保证100多名居民和员工的持续粮食供应。该医院的粮仓账目为分析17世纪末至19世纪末的粮食储存政策提供了一个很好的起点。将粮仓文件与叙述性证据进行比较，可以对其在粮食安全方面的成功或失败进行经验性评估，这也是对（书面）预期准确性的检验。这些帐户包括每月至每周有关当地市场谷物价格的分录，以及医院粮仓储存、销售或消耗的小麦、黑麦、大麦和燕麦的数量。此外，关于医院长期以来的社会经济状况也有大量的叙述资料。这样的数据密度在一个源材料分散的领域是绝对不寻常的。到目前为止，无论是定量的还是定性的来源都没有被历史研究用于经济分析。这一独特的数据集将有助于深入了解医院的粮食储存政策，因此，一项微观研究将深入到难以观察的经验、期望形成和经济行为之间的相互作用问题。特别是，我们将询问医院是否有存储政策，如果有，是否以及为什么在一段时间内发生了重大变化。这些变化是否反映了市场整合和（经济）学习的影响？医院的经济政策是否符合理性或适应性预期，或符合任何定义的理性概念？我们能在文件中找到任何认知偏差的痕迹吗？最后，由于医院是一个慈善机构，储存政策在多大程度上受到社会和道德规范的影响？而且，不管是好是坏：我们将医院储存政策的描述限制在期望或理性的现代概念上，是否公正地对待了这个问题的复杂性？这个项目追溯到现代早期，这一事实可能有助于评估现代概念可以应用到多远的地方，并了解哪些因素偏离了标准，以及它们是否具有时代性。