Couverture / Jaquette

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 aframework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe that is both innovative and authoritative.

Note biographique

Chris Wickham received his DPhil from Oxford in 1975. He was Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Birmingham until his appointment as Chichele Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Oxford in 2005. He has been editor of Past and Present since 1995.

Table des matières

• 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

Détails