Rural Communities in Late Byzantium

Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean

Fotini Kondyli author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:17th Mar '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Rural Communities in Late Byzantium cover

Argues that Late Byzantine rural communities were resilient and able to transform their socioeconomic strategies in the face of crisis.

Uses an interdisciplinary approach combining new archaeological evidence with archival material to reconstruct the lives of rural communities in the Late Byzantine period in the face of economic, political, and demographic challenges. The emphasis on communities' social resilience contributes to a diachronic approach to crisis studies.Late Byzantium faced economic, political, and demographic crises. This book argues for the ability of rural communities to transform their socioeconomic strategies and maintain resilience in the face of these, especially in the context of islands. It seeks to reinstate ordinary people in the historical narrative and reintroduce them as active participants in the events of the period, pointing to their ability not only to react to change, but also to initiate it. Combining new archaeological evidence with archival material pertaining to the islands of Lemnos and Thasos in the Northern Aegean, it provides concrete examples of Byzantine socio-economic strategies that successfully mitigated the various crises and thus contributes to a diachronic perspective on crisis management. The result is to rethink the nature of the Late Byzantine period, and to question the ways in which we have come to divide historical periods into 'good' or 'bad'.

ISBN: 9781108845496

Dimensions: 250mm x 175mm x 18mm

Weight: 730g

302 pages