Chris Wickham

• Italian history to 1250
• Comparative European, Mediterranean and global medieval history
• Social history and archaeology

I have worked on a range of topics in medieval history: detailed rural/regional analyses in an Annales tradition, and also urban histories, of Italy up to the early thirteenth century; comparative history, of socio-economic and socio-political patterns, particularly in late Antiquity and the early middle ages, but later on as well; socio-legal history; the study of social memory in Europe and more widely; and the interface between history and archaeology. 

My current research focusses on the Mediterranean in a long eleventh century and the development of exchange/commercial patterns in that period, from Spain to Egypt; web-based publications of Egyptian texts, and some notably active archaeology in both Spain and Sicily, have very recently made this possible.  I am using archaeology, legal documents and letters, to try to get at how regional exchange fits together with long-distance exchange. Here my aim is to figure out, not only how the Mediterranean economy worked in this period, but also how the logic(s) of pre-capitalist economic systems operated on the ground.