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Joint Winner of the Wolfson Prize for History 2005
Winner of the 2006 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize
Winner of the AHA James Henry Breasted Prize for 2006
Framing the Early Middle Ages
Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800
Chris Wickham
1,018 pages
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13 maps
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234x156mm
978-0-19-926449-0
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Hardback
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22 September 2005
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- The most ambitious and original survey of the early medieval European period ever written - history on a breathtaking scale
- Provides a new framework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe
- Authoritative, comparative history of nearly every region of the post-Roman world
- Brings documentary and archaeological evidence together
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. Readership: Medieval and ancient historians; students and scholars of social and economic history and archaeology.
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Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History, Oxford University
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"history doesn't get any better" - Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly "a tremendous achievement, demonstrating mastery over half a dozen fields of scholarship." - David Abulafia, THES "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." - TLS "Combining close documentary analysis with the latest archaeological research, it is extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging, and one of the great scholarly achievements of the year." - Dominic Sandbrook, The Daily Telegraph "The reader will not only learn an immense amount but
constantly and actively engage both with the material and the arguments of this tremendously rich book." - John Hudson, BBC History "Wickham's work is groundbreaking ... Some of his conclusions may and should be debated, but they rest on an array of evidence and on a series of complex atguments that further discussions should not ignore." - Walter Pohl, Speculum "a magisterial study" - Medium Aevum, Vol. LXXV
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Part I: States
1: Introduction
2: Geography and Politics
3: The Form of the State
Part II: Aristocratic Power-Structures
4: Aristocracies
5: Managing the Land
6: Political Breakdown and State-Building in the North
Part III: Peasantries
7: Peasants and Local Societies: Case Studies
8: Rural Settlement and Village Societies
9: Peasant Society and its Problems
Part IV: Networks
10: Cities
11: Systems of Exchange
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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