Framing the Early Middle Ages

Framing the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Chris Wickham
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162263X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1019

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Book Description
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.

Framing the Early Middle Ages

Framing the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Chris Wickham
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162263X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1019

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Fifty Early Medieval Things

Fifty Early Medieval Things PDF Author: Deborah Deliyannis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
This important book [...] is a helpful guide to thinking with things and teaching with things. Each entry challenges the reader to approach objects as historical actors that can speak to the changes and continuities of life in the late antique and early medieval world.― Early Medieval Europe Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Fifty Early Medieval Things demonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable. Fifty Early Medieval Things introduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects—artifacts, structures, and archaeological features—created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era. Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading.

Scotland in Early Medieval Europe

Scotland in Early Medieval Europe PDF Author: Alice E. Blackwell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789088907517
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This edited volume explores how (what is today) Scotland can be compared with, contrasted to, or was connected with other parts of Early Medieval Europe. Far from a 'dark age', Early Medieval Scotland (AD 300-900) was a crucible of different languages and cultures, the world of the Picts, Scots, Britons and Anglo-Saxons. Though long regarded as somehow peripheral to continental Europe, people in Early Medieval Scotland had mastered complex technologies and were part of sophisticated intellectual networks.This cross-disciplinary volume includes contributions focussing on archaeology, artefacts, art-history and history, and considers themes that connect Scotland with key processes and phenomena happening elsewhere in Europe. Topics explored include the transition from Iron Age to Early Medieval societies and the development of secular power centres, the Early Medieval intervention in prehistoric landscapes, and the management of resources necessary to build kingdoms.

A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India

A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India PDF Author: Upinder Singh
Publisher: Pearson Education India
ISBN: 9788131716779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India is the most comprehensive textbook yet for undergraduate and postgraduate students. It introduces students to original sources such as ancient texts, artefacts, inscriptions and coins, illustrating how historians construct history on their basis. Its clear and balanced explanation of concepts and historical debates enables students to independently evaluate evidence, arguments and theories. This remarkable textbook allows the reader to visualize and understand the rich and varied remains of India s ancient past, transforming the process of discovering that past into an exciting experience.

Early Medieval China

Early Medieval China PDF Author: Wendy Swartz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231531001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south. Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.

From Attila to Charlemagne

From Attila to Charlemagne PDF Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0870999680
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
This well-illustrated (mainly in bandw) volume was produced in conjunction with the opening of the newly refurbished galleries in the museum. The initial chapters discuss the history of collecting of early medieval objects, with two chapters on J.P. Morgan. The remaining scholarly studies discuss the small luxury and everyday metal objects that make up the exceptional collection at the Met; consideration of the archaeological context is prominent. Individual papers discuss jewelry from various locations, the Vermand treasure, the Domagnano treasure, the Vrap treasure, and an analysis of the Lindau book cover. The contributors are affiliated with academic and museum institutions in the US and Europe. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Early Medieval Architecture

Early Medieval Architecture PDF Author: R. A. Stalley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192842237
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Drawing on new work published over the past twenty years, the author offers a history of building in Western Europe from 300 to 1200. Medieval castles, church spires, and monastic cloisters are just some of the areas covered.

Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages

Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Julio Escalona
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503532394
Category : Archaeology, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages

Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Frans Theuws
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004117342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Saint-Maurice d'Agaune - Gudme - Vistula - Francia - Maastricht - Aachen - Gaul - Cordoba.

Global Connections

Global Connections PDF Author: Wilfred J. Bisson
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 9781413414431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The brilliance of the Maya, the radiance of China´s Tang Dynasty, Ghana´s greatness, Charlemagne´s empire, and the emergence of Islamic civilization - all these and more were contemporaneous during the Early Medieval Age. While Polynesians were settling Easter Island and Vikings were colonizing Iceland, Muslims were learning to make paper from the Chinese and a new Mound Builder civilization was developing in the Mississippi Valley. Huge structures, such as the temple of Borubudur, the Great Pyramid at Cholula and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem were being built. This book connects these and many other seemingly disparate events in a unified narrative of World History for this period. During the fifteen generations of these three centuries, the global population increased, the area of cultivated land expanded, great cities were founded, and the "high civilizations" (Chinese, Indian and Muslim) spread to new peoples and new states. Much of the Eastern Hemisphere (with the partial exception of some of Africa South of the Sahara) was interconnected through trade, warfare, the spread of religions, crops, technology and peoples. It was one large ecumene. On the other hand, the Americas, the Pacific Islands and Australia were almost completely isolated from that ecumene. They developed according to their own dynamics and in their own solitudes. But there were some striking parallels and coincidences: Polynesians were crossing the Pacific as Vikings were crossing the Atlantic, and Mayan savants and the philosophers of India independently discovered the concept of zero in the same centuries. This global tour through the parallel lives of Early Medieval Civilizations is accomplished in seventeen chapters. There are chapters on the Americas, Oceania, Inner Eurasia and Western Europe. Three chapters concern the peoples of the Sahara and Africa South of the Sahara; India and the Indianized states of Southeast Asia are discussed in two chapters as are Tang China and the imitators of Tang in East Asia. Mohammed was the super star of the Age; his career and the rise of Islamic Civilization were a mystery and a marvel. How relatively small numbers of camel riding Muslim enthusiasts could defeat larger numbers of trained and disciplined troops, how they could simutaneously destroy one of the world´s greatest empires and nearly fatally weaken another is a great puzzle. The Muslims conquered the most extensive empire the world had known, stretching from Spain to the borders of China and India, and created a new sophisticated urban civilization which has been called the first world civilization which vied with Tang China for the reputation as the central civilization. The rise and spread of Islam and Islamic civilization are the largest topics in the book, requiring four chapters. The book is organized as a historical tour through the Early Medieval Age, starting with the Dorset Inuit in North America. The section on North America discusses the diffusion of bows and arrows, but spends more time on the transition from Hopewell to Mississippian among the Mound Builder civilizations as well as the emergence of Pueblo civilization in the Southwest. From the Southwest, the book moves to Mesoamerica, where the foci are the destruction of Teotihuacan and the rise of its successors; and the Late Classic Period among the Maya, particularly the wars between Calakmul and Tikal. There are sections on the Circum-Caribbean and Amazonia, but the bulk of the remainder of the section on the Americas centers on the Andean civilizations, particularly the empires of Wari and Tiwanaku. From the Americas, the narrative follows the sweet potato to Oceania, where the emphasis is on Polynesia (especially Hawaii) and Melanesia.There is a brief discussion of Australia. After Oceania, the discussion moves to the Eastern Hemisphere. The near simultaneous emerg