Just Enough

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

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2. Thinking Enough

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Just Enough: An Introduction

      • Matthew Ingleby, Samuel Randalls

      Pages 3-12

   3. Enough: A Lexical-Semantic Approach

      • Kathryn Allan

      Pages 13-25

3. Historicizing Sufficiency in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-28

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   2. Enough-ness in the Later Middle Ages

      • Hannah Skoda

      Pages 29-46

   3. Daily Bread: Ideas of Sufficiency in Early Modern England

      • Ethan H. Shagan

      Pages 47-59

4. Limit Cases in Nineteenth-Century Modernity

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 61-62

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   2. Sufficiency and Simplicity in the Life and Writings of Edward Carpenter

      • Wendy Parkins

      Pages 63-76

   3. ‘These Are the Cases Who Call Themselves “Moderate Drinkers,” Because They Are Never Seen Embracing a Lamp-Post’: The Problem of Moderate Drinking in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain

      • James Kneale

      Pages 77-94

5. Enough for the Present

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 95-97

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   2. ‘Fashion Acolytes or Environmental Saviours? When Will Young People Have Had “Enough”?’

      • Rebecca Collins

      Pages 99-115

   3. What Would a Sufficiency Economy Look like?

      • Samuel Alexander

      Pages 117-134

6. Back Matter

   Pages 135-137

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This book fosters a wide-ranging and nuanced discussion of the concept of ‘enough’. Acknowledging the prominence of notions of sufficiency in debates about sustainability, it argues for a more complex, culturally and historically informed understanding of how these might be manifested across a wide array of contexts. Rather than simply adding further case studies of sufficiency in order to prove the efficacy of what might be called ‘finite planet economics’, the book holds up to the light a crucial ‘keyword’ within the sustainability discourse, tracing its origins and anatomising its current repertoire of usages. Chapters focus on the sufficiency of food, drink and clothing to track the concept of 'enough' from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.


By expanding the historical and cultural scope of sufficiency, this book fills a significant gap in the current market for authors, students and the wider informed audience who want to more deeply understandthe changing and developing use of this term.

• Sufficiency
• sustainability
• finite planet economics
• medieval society
• austerity
• societal economics
• literary diction
• British and Irish Literature

• School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

  Matthew Ingleby

• Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK

  Samuel Randalls

Matthew Ingleby is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous published works include G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity (Bloomsbury 2013), Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (British Library Publishing, 2017) and the upcoming Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). His research focuses on the cultural meditation of urban and coastal space in the nineteenth century. 


Samuel Randalls is a Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London and has previously co-edited a four-volume reader on Future Climate Change (Routledge, 2012) and the Handbook of the Political Economy of Science (Routledge, 2017). His research focuses on the historical, contemporary and future relationships between environments, businesses/economics and science.

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