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.

The Early Middle Ages

The Early Middle Ages PDF Author: James A. Corrick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781560062462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The Early Middle Ages, the 500 years following the fall of Rome, was a violent time of invasion and war that saw the breakdown of society. Yet, this period saw important social and political changes, leading first to the civilization of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and then to modern western culture.

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.

Fifty Early Medieval Things

Fifty Early Medieval Things PDF Author: Deborah Deliyannis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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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.

The Early Middle Ages

The Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Rosamond McKitterick
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198731733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The Early Middle Ages (400-1000) was one of the most dynamic and crucial periods in the formation of Europe. It covers the transition from the relatively diverse world of Roman Empire in late antiquity, to the disparate world of early medieval Europe, where local differences assumed fargreater significance, but where, nonetheless, the institution of Latin Christianity lent coherence to the successor states. In this book, McKitterick and five other leading historians have collaborated closely to produce a set of thematic interpretations covering politics, society, economy, culture,religion, and Europe and the wider world. Military matters and warfare are treated within these chapters, reflecting their entrenchment in social, economic, and political stuctures. The definition of 'Europe' is ambiguous in this period, but for the most part, 'Europe' coincides with theever-expanding horizons of Latin Christendom. However, this book also looks at crucial interactions with other areas, such as Scandinavia, eastern Europe, the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, and Byzantium. Providing a coherent view of the most important elements within the period, this bookgives a sense of the complexities and excitements of six hundred years of transition.

Language & Power in the Early Middle Ages

Language & Power in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Patrick J. Geary
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611683912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Language and ideology in the scholarship of the late Middle Ages

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Warren Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702529X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.

The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Irene van Renswoude
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107038138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Analyses the rhetoric of dissidents, outsiders and truth-tellers to challenge preconceptions about free speech and political criticism in the early Middle Ages.

East and West in the Early Middle Ages

East and West in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Stefan Esders
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110718715X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume re-evaluates the interconnectedness of the Merovingian world with its Mediterranean surroundings.

Early Middle Ages, 500-1000

Early Middle Ages, 500-1000 PDF Author: Robert Brentano
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451602308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
Spanning the years 500 to 1000 A.D., this volume illustrates the conflict between brutality and civilization that seemed to characterize the period so often called—not improperly—the "Dark Ages." Islam and Byzantium, as much as Western Europe, figure in the twenty-two chapters of documents offered in this book, part of the ten-volume series, "Sources of Western Civilization."