"Making Early Medieval Societies" explores a fundamental question: what held the small- and large-scale communities of the late Roman and early medieval West together, at a time when the world seemed to be falling apart? Historians and anthropologists have traditionally asked parallel questions about the rise and fall of empires and how societies create a sense of belonging and social order in the absence of strong governmental institutions. This book draws on classic and more recent anthropologists' work to consider dispute settlement and conflict management during and after the end of the Roman Empire. Contributions range across the internecine rivalries of late Roman bishops, the marital disputes of warrior kings, and the tension between religious leaders and the unruly crowds in western Europe after the first millennium - all considering the mechanisms through which conflict could be harnessed as a force for social stability or an engine for social change.
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Author(s): Kate Cooper, Conrad Leyser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: XII+282
Preface and acknowledgements ix
List of contributors xii
Introduction: making early medieval societies 1
Conrad Leyser
1. Property, power, and conflict: re-thinking the Constantinian revolution 16
Kate Cooper
2. Playing with fire: conflicting bishops in late Roman Spain and Gaul 33
David Natal and Jamie Wood
3. After Rome, before Francia: religion, ethnicity, and identity politics in Gregory of Tours' "Ten Books of
Histories" 58
Helmut Reimitz
4. "To mistake gold for wealth": the Venerable Bede and the fate of Northumbria 80
Martin J. Ryan
5. The incidence of rebellion in the early medieval West 104
Paul Fouracre
6. Disputes and documents in early medieval Italy 125
Marios Costambeys
7. Divorce and remarriage between late antiquity and the early middle ages: canon law and conflict resolution 155
Riccardo Bof and Conrad Leyser
8. The memory of Gregory the Great and the making of Latin Europe, 600–1000 181
Conrad Leyser
9. The weight of opinion: religion and the people of Europe from the tenth to the twelfth century 202
R. I. Moore
10. "The peace in the feud" revisited: feuds in the peace in medieval European feuds 220
Stephen D. White
Bibliography 244
Index 279
