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Kings, aristocrats, peasants, and the Church are among the shared features of most early medieval societies. However, these also varied dramatically in time and space. Can petty regional kings, for instance, be compared to those in charge of a whole empire? Scale is a crucial factor in modelling, explaining, and conceptualizing the past. Furthermore, many issues that historians and archaeologists treat independently can be theorized together as processes of scale decrease or increase: the appearance of complex societies, the rise and collapse of empires, changing world-systems, and globalization. While a subject of much discussion in fields such as ecology, geography, and sociology, scale is rarely theorized by archaeologists and historians. This book highlights the potential of the concepts of scale and scale change for comparing and explaining medieval socio-spatial processes. It integrates regional and temporal variations in the fragmentation of the Roman world and the emergence of medieval polities, which are often handled separately by late antique and early medieval specialists. The result of a three-year research project, the nine case studies in this volume offer fresh insights into early medieval rural society while combining their individual subjects to generate a wider explanatory framework.
This book compares community definition and change in the temperate zones of southern Britain and northern France with the starkly contrasting regions of the Spanish meseta and Iceland. Local communities were fundamental to human societies in the pre-industrial world, crucial in supporting their members and regulating their relationships, as well as in wider society. While geographical and biological work on territoriality is very good, existing archaeological literature is rarely time-specific and lacks wider social context; most of its premises are too simple for the interdependencies of the early medieval world. Historical work, by contrast, has a weak sense of territory and no sense of scale; like much archaeological work, there is confusion about distinctions - and relationships - between kin groups, neighbourhood groups, collections of tenants and small polities. The contributors to this book address what determined the size and shape of communities in the early historic past and the ways that communities delineated themselves in physical terms. The roles of the environment, labour patterns, the church and the physical proximity of residences in determining community identity are also examined. Additional themes include social exclusion, the community as an elite body, and the various stimuli for change in community structure. Major issues surrounding relationships between the local and the governmental are investigated: did larger polities exploit pre-existing communities, or did developments in governance call local communities into being?
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 combines documentary and archaeological evidence to create a comparative history of the period 400-800. His analysis embraces each of the regions of the late Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt. 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 give only a partial picture of the period, but they frame and explain other developments. 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 volume presents the first multidisciplinary bioarchaeological analysis to reconstruct life conditions in ancient Tuscany between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This was done through the examination of stress markers, including adult stature, periosteal reaction, cranial porosities, linear enamel hypoplasia and paleodietary reconstruction.
Earliest Christian art - Saints and holy places - Holy images - Artistic production for the wealthy - Icons & iconography.
This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.
Examines the fundamental question of what held the societies of the post-Roman world together.
This book presents an overview of the results of the research project DESPAMED funded by the Spanish Minister of Economy and Competitiveness. The aim of the book is to discuss the theoretical challenges posed by the study of social inequality and social complexity in early medieval peasant communities in North-western Iberia.
The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce. Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.
How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti.