Examines the fundamental question of what held the societies of the post-Roman world together.

Fifty Early Medieval Things introduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects—artifacts, structures, and archaeological features—created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era. Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Fifty Early Medieval Things demonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable.

How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti.

This volume provides a complex discussion of the variety of social efforts which were undertaken to create meaningful communities in the process of the formation of the early medieval gentes and kingdoms in the post-Roman west.

A study of how bonds of kinship, friendship and lordship shaped medieval European political life.

Between A.D. 200 and 1000, sponsorship at baptism evolved from a simple liturgical act into a mechanism for the creation of enduring relationships regarded as especially holy forms of kinship. Combining anthropological, historical, theological, and literary approaches, Joseph Lynch presents a comprehensive analysis of the origins and development in Western society of this "spiritual" kinship. Because of its solemnity and adaptability, such kinship gradually took its place alongside blood and marital ties as a fundamental part of medieval society, continuing to expand in high and late medieval Europe and to flourish even in modern times, particularly in Latin America. Professor Lynch traces the liturgical practices and theological beliefs undergirding sponsorship and examines its social purposes, including sacralization of personal firendships, creation of client/patron reltionships, extension of marital taboos, provision of protectors for the young, fostering of trust among adults, and dissemination of religious instruction. In the process he offers a rich array of insights into the Church's role in the passage of Western society from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Joseph H. Lynch is Professor of History and former Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University. He is author of Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life form 1000 to 1260: A Social, Economic and Legal Study (Ohio State). Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

From the 5th to the 7th century AD, the southern North Sea area functioned as an important cultural and political bridge, linking two power blocks: the late Roman Empire and its Frankish successor kingdom to the south, and the Scandinavian kingdoms to the north. This book examines how the region's intermediary position is reflected in the jewellery and other ornaments of gold and silver found along the southern North Sea coasts, and how it relates to the formation of kingdoms and the expression of group identity after the collapse of the West-Roman Empire. The book first discusses the history of earlier research into kingship around the southern North Sea, and this is followed by a description of the individual research regions: the northern and western Netherlands, northern Germany and southeast England. After presenting the valuables of gold and silver from graves, hoards and settlement sites with their dating and contextual evidence in an extensive catalogue, the author examines how such items circulated between and within early medieval societies, were transformed into symbols expressing regional or supraregional identities, and eventually ended up in the ground. The various research themes come together in the synthesis, in which elite networks around the southern North Sea are reconstructed, and the expression of ethnic or other group identities among the members of such networks is considered. Finally, in an epilogue, the finds from the North Sea region are confronted with the nature and composition of the Staffordshire hoard. For the first time not only presenting, but also interpreting the superb collection of valuables from the southern North Sea area as a whole, this book makes compulsive reading for anyone interested in the fascinating world of early medieval Europe.

Local churches were an established part of many towns and villages across early medieval Western Europe, and their continued presence make them an invaluable marker for comparing different societies. Up to now, however, the dynamics of power behind church building and the importance of their presence within the landscape have largely been neglected. This book takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of early medieval churches, drawing together archaeology, history, architecture, and landscape studies in order to explore the relationship between church foundation, social power, and political organization across Europe. Key subjects addressed here include the role played by local elites and the importance of the church in buttressing authority, as well as the connections between archaeology and ideology, and the importance of individual church buildings in their broader landscape contexts. Bringing together case-studies from diverse regions across Western Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, the British Isles, Denmark, and Iceland), the seventeen contributions to this volume offer new insights into the relationships between church foundations, social power, and political organization. In doing so, they provide a means to better understand social power in the landscape of early medieval Europe.

This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum (the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France). The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They analyze Latin and Old French discourses that medieval nobles used to construct their relationships with kin, lords, men, and friends, and investigate the political dimensions of such relationships with particular reference to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, and feuding. In so doing, the essays call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for studying them.