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

by Chris Wickham

Overview

In the most ambitious and ground-breaking survey of the early middle ages ever written, Chris Wickham moves away from the fragmentary tendency to view the history of the period as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. Instead he provides a comparative history of the years 400-800 systematically analysing each of the regions of the early middle ages, from Denmark to Egypt. In doing so he creates a framework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe that is both innovative and authoritative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191532610
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/22/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book and a subject with a pedigree that demands the closest attention...[A] tour de force...Wickham'snds Framing the Early Middle Ages may be the last great historical work of the last century."—The New Republic

"History doesn't get any better...More than almost any history I've read, Wickham's manages to be at once grand and rigorous. In its adroit and confident treatment of an array of subjects and disciplines, and in its exhaustive bibliography, this book, like Brown's [Rise of Western Christendom], has encapsulated and synthesized a burgeoning field of scholarship at the point of perhaps its greatest creativity."—Benjamin Schwarz, he Atlantic Monthly

"For all its great range, its methodological self-awareness, its deployment of precise and often closely analysed data from many disciplines and kinds of source, there is hardly a page of Framing the Early Middle Ages which a newcomer to the period would not find accessible, indeed warmly welcoming, in the informality of its tone, the scrupulous articulation of its reasoning and its care not to presume on the prior knowledge of the reader...It raises the bar for all future discussion of large-scale historical change, and not just for this period, but it also shows us how we may occasionally scramble over it."—Times Literary Supplement

"Wickham has an admirably clear and pragmatic way of tackling the sheer weight of both the evidence and of previous scholarship...groundbreaking."—Speculum

From the Publisher