FAMe

FAMe (Famines in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. An electronic database) aims to become a comprehensive database of the Ancient and Medieval Famines in Europe and the Mediterranean.

In its current state, it is intended as a demonstrator of the interest of a systematic recording of all the mentions of famines, hungers and their proxies, to foster the construction of an international network of scholars wishing to enrich and exploit it and use all the potentialities of the digital tools.

QFAMe is a graphical application to manipulate the information. Registered users have a complete access to the database (sometimes with writting rights), but a demo access exists and allows to consult part of the database.

In the future, we will:

• Offer an up-to-date description of the relations between the different narratives sources mentioning famines (as Curschmann’s repertory has to be refurbished), and enrich their description, allowing more complex researches (by location, time-span, causation, etc.).
• Offer more complete quotations of the sources, including the context of the mentions of famines and direct links to open-access editions and electronic directories of sources.
• Enrich the database by inserting other narrative, legal and diplomatic sources, coming from the Latin West but also from other corpuses (Byzantine and Arabic sources, etc.).
• Encode paleoscientific proxies (climatic/GISP2 data ; dendrochronological indices, etyc.) to allow cross analysis.
• Allow the building of customized maps and use of the data in GIS.

All downloads of QFAMe:
Download QFAMe 1.84.6 for Mac OSX
Download QFAMe 1.84.6 for Windows Vista/7/8

This project has been launched by the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the FNRS-FRS (Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique). It is directed by Jean-Pierre Devroey, Vincent Vandenberg and Alexis Wilkin, in close collaboration with the Paul Otlet Institute (Pascal Francq). It received the support of the Fondation David et Alice Van Buuren and the Faculty of Letters of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

It is patronized by the Royal Historical Commission (CRH) of Belgium.

FAMe will be enriched by the addition of other partners from other universities.