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

在前现代经济中，无论是在个人层面还是在社会层面，粮食供应都是一项关键的经济任务。鉴于粮食在中欧饮食中的重要性，粮食储存的管理对生存至关重要。虽然我们可以很容易地观察到这些政策的失败(导致昂贵的粮食收购或饥饿)，但通常很难直接观察粮食储存政策。研究经济预期的形成更加困难，而且在大多数情况下是不可能的。雷根斯堡的圣凯瑟琳S医院是一家慈善机构，不得不为100多名居民和员工提供持续的粮食供应，为分析17世纪末至19世纪末的粮食储存政策提供了一个极好的起点。将粮仓文件与叙述证据进行比较，可以对它们在粮食安全方面的成败进行经验评估，这也是对(书面)预期准确性的一种检验。这些账目包括每月到每周的账目，涉及当地市场上的谷物价格，以及医院S粮仓储存、销售或消费的小麦、黑麦、大麦和燕麦的数量。此外，还有大量关于医院S一段时间以来的社会经济情况的叙述来源。在一个来源材料分散的领域，这样的数据密度是绝对不寻常的。到目前为止，历史研究还没有使用定量和定性的来源来进行经济分析。这一独特的数据集将使人们能够深入了解S医院的粮食储存政策，并因此进行一项微观研究，深入研究难以观察到的经验、预期形成和经济行为之间的互动问题。特别是，我们会问医院是否有储存政策，如果有，它是否以及为什么在一段时间内经历了重大变化。这些变化是否反映了市场一体化和(经济)学习的影响？医院的S经济政策是符合理性的还是适应性的预期，还是符合理性的定义？我们能在这些文件中找到任何认知偏见的痕迹吗？最后，由于医院是一家慈善机构，储存政策在多大程度上受到了社会和道德规范的影响？而且，无论是好是坏：我们将对医院S存储政策的描述限制在期望或理性的现代概念上，这是否公平地对待这个问题的复杂性？这一项目可以追溯到早期现代时期，这一事实可能有助于评估现代观念可能落后到什么程度，以及哪些因素偏离了时代，以及它们是否具有特定的时代特征。

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.