Framing the Early Middle Ages Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800

by Wickham, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780199212965
• ISBN10: 0199212961
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole. By contrast, the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history-writing is much more fragmented. There have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. Although, in recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaelogy has transformed our knowledge of the period, this has been adequately integrated into wider syntheses anywhere. This book aims to change this.

Author Biography

Chris Wickham received his DPhil from Oxford in 1975. He has taught at the University of Birmingham since then and is currently Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford. He has been editor of Past and Present since 1995.

Table of Contents

List of maps	p. x
Abbreviations	p. xi
Notes on terminology	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
States
Geography and politics	p. 17
The form of the state	p. 56
Aristocratic power-structures
Aristocracies	p. 153
Managing the land	p. 259
Political breakdown and state-building in the North	p. 303
Peasantries
Peasants and local societies: case studies	p. 383
Rural settlement and village societies	p. 442
Peasant society and its problems	p. 519
Networks
Cities	p. 591
Systems of exchange	p. 693
General conclusions	p. 825
Bibliography	p. 832
Primary sources	p. 832
Secondary sources	p. 845
Index	p. 945
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