Guido Alfani is Associate Professor of Economic History at Universit... Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he has published extensively on Early Modern Italy and Europe, specialising in the history of famines and epidemics, in economic inequality, and in social alliance systems. He is the author of Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2013) and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project EINITE, 'Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800.'

Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College Dublin. He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's gold medal for the humanities in 2009 and is currently president-elect of the Economic History Association. He has published on topics ranging from the European Little Ice Age and London's last plague epidemics to the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Recent works include Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (2006), Famine: A Short History (2009), and Eating People Is Wrong and Other Essays on the History and Future of Famine (2015).

This is the first systematic study of famines in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages until the present. In case studies ranging from Scandinavia and Italy to Ireland and Russia, leading scholars compare the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine. The famines they describe differ greatly in size, duration and context; in many cases the damage wrought by poor harvests was confounded by war. The roles of human action, malfunctioning markets and poor relief are a recurring theme. The chapters also take full account of demographic, institutional, economic, social and cultural aspects, providing a wealth of new information which is organized and analysed within a comparative framework. Famine in European History represents a significant new contribution to demographic history, and will be of interest to all those who want to discover more about famines - truly horrific events which, for centuries, have been a recurring curse for the Europeans.