DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Neighbours and Strangers

Local Societies in Early Medieval Europe

Bernhard Zeller author Charles West author Francesca Tinti author Carine van Rhijn author Thomas Kohl author Marco Stoffella author Nicolas Schroeder author Steffen Patzold author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Manchester University Press

Published:12th Jul '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Neighbours and Strangers cover

This book explores social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe from 700–1050, asking to what extent settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side – neighbours. Drawing evidence from most of the current western European countries, the book plots and interrogates the very different practices of this wide range of regions in a systematically comparative framework. Neighbours and strangers considers the variety of local responses to the supra-local agents of landlords and rulers and the impact, such as it was, of those agents on the small-scale residential group. It also assesses the impact on local societies of the values, instructions and demands of the wider literate world of Christianity, as delivered by local priests.

'[…] a valuable “handbook,” enabling young medievalists to shape their research according to an innovative methodology which has succeeded in escaping the confines of the master narratives that long characterized
European medieval studies.'
Speculum

'This original and stimulating book explores evidence for social collaboration and collective identity in western and central Europe from 700 to 1000.'
Early Medieval Europe

ISBN: 9781526163899

Dimensions: 216mm x 138mm x 16mm

Weight: 358g

308 pages