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

by Wickham, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780199264490
• ISBN10: 019926449X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country. In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham aims at integrating documentary and archaeological evidence together, and also, above all, at creating a comparative history of the period 400-800, by means of systematic comparative analyses of each of the regions of the latest Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt (only the Slav areas are left out). The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange. These are only a partial picture of the period, but they are intended as a framing for other developments, without which those other developments cannot be properly understood. Wickham argues that only a complex comparative analysis can act as the basis for a wider synthesis. Whilst earlier syntheses have taken the development of a single region as 'typical', with divergent developments presented as exceptions, this book takes all different developments as typical, and aims to construct a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons for it. This is the most ambitious and original survey of the period ever written.

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	x
Abbreviations	xi
Notes on terminology	xiv
Introduction	1	(16)
Part I. States
Geography and politics	17	(39)
The form of the state	56	(97)
Part II. Aristocratic power-structures
Aristocracies	153	(106)
Managing the land	259	(44)
Political breakdown and state-building in the North	303	(80)
Part III. Peasantries
Peasants and local societies: case studies	383	(59)
Rural settlement and village societies	442	(77)
Peasant society and its problems	519	(72)
Part IV. Networks
Cities	591	(102)
Systems of exchange	693	(132)
General conclusions	825	(7)
Bibliography	832	(112)
Primary sources	832	(13)
Secondary sources	845	(99)
Index	944