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The Christian kingdoms and al-Andalus
Charles Insley

This double-length chapter considers both the Christian and Muslim kingdoms in the early medieval Iberian peninsula, starting with a presentation of the ideologically charged debates over reconquista and despoblación that have characterized the historiography of this region. A concise synopsis of the historical narrative, unique to this chapter, aids orientation given the unfamiliar and fragmented geopolitical framework. The chapter then examines in what Christian kingship in the polities of northern Spain may have consisted of, a study undertaken in comparison with the very different nature of Andalusian rule focused on the city of Córdoba. Identity and religiosity are discussed together. The contentious paradigm of convivencia, defined as the coexistence of peoples of different faiths, and the considerable scholarly debates – in recent times extremely heated – are discussed.

in Debating medieval Europe
From Alfred to the Norman Conquest
Paul Oldfield

This chapter examines the British Isles from the late ninth to the mid-eleventh century, and begins with a discussion of state formation, in which England has been argued to be precociously bureaucratized in comparison with its close neighbours. It sets out the debate concerning ‘English exceptionalism’ – whether later Anglo-Saxon England was, in fact, an embryonic ‘nation-state’, considering the nature of English governmentality as systematic and intensive. It considers to what extent a parallel phenomenon can be detected in Scotland, whereas elsewhere in the British Isles similar processes do not seem to have been at work, though temporary hegemonies did emerge. In terms of identity, it considers to what extent regional identities survived alongside the intentional cultivation of an ‘English’ identity by a political elite in the tenth century. Finally, it addresses the question of the Christianization of the British Isles, particularly with reference to the areas with most extensive Scandinavian settlement, and the monastic reform movements of the tenth century that connected the Anglo-Saxon Church with continental trends.

in Debating medieval Europe
Abstract only
Transformations around the year 1000
Paul Fouracre

The momentous historiographical debates surrounding the idea of a ‘feudal revolution’ stand at the centre of this chapter. It considers, first, the nature of social and political change in Francia in the decades around the year 1000, and the putative shift in a post-Carolingian world towards a privatization of public power: or whether, in fact, these changes are just tricks of the evidentiary light, the product of shifts in documentary culture. It turns next to the emergence of the new social stratum of knights, and changes to family and kin structure as the basis for personal identification, together with an apparent rise of unfreedom as individuals sought the protection of the Church against the warlords. Finally, it considers the rising donations to Frankish monasteries in this period, and their concomitant growth in status. It assesses the ‘Peace of God’ movement as an ecclesiastical response to violence, driven by those newly empowered monasteries.

in Debating medieval Europe
A guide for students
Stephen Mossman

In place of an introduction, this first section – before the chapters proper – sets out the conception of the textbook for an undergraduate audience. It speaks directly to the student reader and explains the geographical and chronological restrictions within which the textbook operates. It sets out the three guiding themes of governmentality, identity and religiosity that structure each chapter, and explains what the authors of the chapters understand by them. The front cover of the volume, which reproduces the frontispiece of the Liber vitae from the New Minster, Winchester, is explored in order to demonstrate the interplay and significance of these three themes. A final note explains the balance that each author has tried to achieve in the presentation of bibliography between English- and foreign-language items, and how the short-form references in the footnotes and the bibliography should be used to pursue the study of particular issues.

in Debating medieval Europe
Stephen Mossman

The final chapter considers the Normans as a trans-regional entity and so functions as a counterpart to the broad geographical context of the first chapter. It begins by exploring the debate surrounding Norman administration: whether the Normans were responsible for introducing a particularly advanced governmental administration into areas they occupied, or whether they co-opted pre-existing structures. Here the Domesday Book in England is an important case study. The chapter turns next to the question of Norman identity: whether there was a common sense of ‘Norman-ness’ across the different areas conquered and ruled by Normans, and for how long and to what extent common bonds remained. It considers the extent to which Normans imposed change on the religious institutions and practices (notably the cult of saints) that they encountered locally. Finally, it discusses the Norman cultivation of a sense of being divinely guided in their mission of conquest, and the hotly debated question of whether the Norman conquest of Sicily ought consequently to be considered the ‘real’ First Crusade.

in Debating medieval Europe
Paul Fouracre

This chapter considers the history of those polities that were formed across western Europe in the wake of the Roman Empire: many relatively short-lived, but others of much greater longevity, some of which are seen as the ancestors of modern European nation-states. It considers first their nature as ‘states’, questioning the utility of that term to describe what were often very large territories indeed, extensively governed but in a very shallow manner, with only limited purchase on the lives of the governed. It turns then to the question of identity, initially picking up the theme of ethnic labels raised in the first chapter, before turning to law and social status as arguably much more important markers of identity. Finally, it considers the religious life of the period: the great proliferation of holy men (and some women), the Christian saints, accounts of whose lives give us so much of our evidence for this period, and the widespread foundation of monasteries, in which those accounts were written and copied.

in Debating medieval Europe
Craig H. Caldwell

This first chapter sets out different approaches to the question of what survived in western Europe from the later Roman Empire, after its central institutions had ceased to exist in the mid-fifth century. How far and in what ways did the practices of Roman governmentality – notably taxation – survive and persist into the post-Roman world? The chapter next considers the emergence, to use a neutral term, of peoples with different ethnic labels in that post-Roman world – Goths, Lombards, Franks – and different theories of ethnic formation. Who were these people, and how can textual and material (archaeological) evidence identify them? Finally, the chapter considers the ‘glue’ that held late antiquity together and gave it coherence: Christianity, and the balance between centralization and regional difference in the Latin Church of Rome.

in Debating medieval Europe
Abstract only
Ottonian Germany
T. J. H McCarthy

The revival of the Western Empire in the tenth century in the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine, no longer in the Western Frankish heartlands of the Carolingian Empire, was described by contemporaries as its ‘translation’, and it is this new empire of the Ottonian Reich that is the subject of the fourth chapter. It considers first the nature of that empire as an extremely decentralized polity, a form of governmentality thoroughly different to other medieval conceptions of a ‘state’, and then turns to the way in which the late emergence of Germany as a united nation-state has conditioned, as nowhere else in Europe, the study of its medieval origins: the idea that Germany was on a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). It considers then the identity of this empire, examining the idea of imperial ‘renovation’ and of the relationships that it constructed to its Carolingian and Roman precursors. Finally, it examines the relationship of Ottonian government to its Church, once seen as the tool through which it exercised power in the absence of any recognizable state structures; and to the real vibrancy of the Ottonian Church, evident in the great waves of monastic reform and in its resplendent manuscript culture.

in Debating medieval Europe
Robert Portass

This chapter begins with an extended discussion of what it means to speak of ‘vikings’, arguing in favour of the term being used in the lower case as a designation of a particular occupation, not as a catch-all ethnic label. It considers the associated issues with the source material: the absence of early medieval Scandinavian written texts, which requires a reliance on external perceptions of the vikings recorded in non-Scandinavian sources. After these prolegomena, it considers the evidence for social-political organization in Scandinavia and in areas of Scandinavian settlement, notably in the British Isles. It examines the question of the assimilation and/or acculturation of these new settlers, and the formation of regional identities among them. Finally, it considers the material evidence of pagan religiosity and of the gradual Christianization of viking Scandinavia.

in Debating medieval Europe
Kevern Verney

The first tentative indications that times were changing came in the 1960s and, more particularly, the 1970s. The sustained civil rights protests of these years contributed to growing interest by scholars in examining the strategies of protest and accommodation adopted by African Americans in earlier periods. The daily lives of black slaves in the antebellum South became an especial focus for academic study. Historian Daniel Leab's line of enquiry typified what by the 1980s had become a dominant trend in studies by cultural historians, namely to explore the origins, character and significance of stereotyped depictions of African Americans in US popular culture. The 1990s saw both rapid and unprecedented developments in the academic study of popular culture. In part this interest can be seen as reflecting the cult of celebrity that enveloped the leading stars of sport, music, film and television entertainment at the close of the century.

in The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America