‘How I long for the good old days’: Nostalgia and Social Change in the Long Fourteenth Century

The fourteenth century is characterized by a series of profound structural changes. This lecture forms part of a larger monograph project arguing that one of the ways in which people in England, France, and Italy responded to these changes was in a nostalgic mode. It was by articulating a longing for ‘the good old days’ that contemporaries tried to come to terms with plague, extreme demographic shifts, rapid commercialization, growing social mobility, rapid political change, pervasive warfare, and so on.