"The Urban Food Supply - Reality and Fiction of the Corporative System"
In this presentation Robin Rose Southard will give an overview of the first stages of her research into the early modern urban food supply of the Southern Netherlands. The early modern food market was a highly regulated endeavor with a lot of different socio-economic actors navigating the urban scene with their own agenda. The nature of this scene has been the stake in many a debate on broader topics such as early modern economic growth, liberal economics, women on the labor market, the guilds and more. Yet, key elements of perhaps its most fundamental institution, the market, remain unknown. By looking at questions such as how did actors enact their agency on the market and how did practice differ from regulation she aims to address this. In her presentation she will discuss her research questions, the current historiographical status quo and how she intends to bring historical results to the (dinner)table.
Robin Rose Southard has been working as a PhD history student at the VUB since November of 2020. She is affiliated with HOST, the Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes research group. Her professional interests are socio-economic and cultural history and she’s always down for an early modern court battle.