4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180
January 2023
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Book
This book aims to reinterpret, and in many places to discover for the first time, what the main lines of economic development were in the central medieval Mediterranean between the mid-tenth century and the end of the twelfth. This is not well understood; we are reliant on sketchy syntheses of fifty years ago. New work on archaeology, especially on ceramics, allows us to understand exchange much better than we could in the last century. The book discusses and compares the regional economies of Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine Empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy. In each case, regional development was more important than the impulse of Mediterranean trade in itself, which developed, by contrast, essentially as a spin-off of regional developments. Egyptian shipping dominated the Mediterranean before 1100; Italian ships became increasingly important in the twelfth century. But Egypt remained the strongest Mediterranean economy, and Islamic Spain the fastest-growing economy, for the whole period of the book; out of the regions studied, northern Italy was the slowest to get off the ground. One of the main drivers in every case was the prosperity and thus demand of at least some strata of the peasant majority; another was the local force of the state. This overturns all previous assumptions about the period.
The Feudal Revolution and the Origins of Italian City Communes.
January 2023
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Journal article
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Revue Historique
For a long time scholars have identified and studied the feudal revolution and the origins of the Italian city communes as two major phenomena of the central Middle Ages. But historians have seldom tried to compare them, even less understand them as two manifestations of a larger process. The point of this paper is to show how both are underpinned by the same logic: the breakdown of wider power structures and their simultaneous replacement by a set of increasingly formalized, locally-based, structures which were until then more informal. With that aim, it synthesizes the profuse literature of the feudal revolution and then analyses some Italian examples, which are the main focus of the paper. It suggests a new way of understanding the origins of the communes, as the result of a dialectic between formal and informal structures. In conclusion, the paper looks at the whole dynamics of social and political change in the central Middle Ages, through a discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus theory.
Intervista a Chris Wickham. A cura di Maria Elena Cortese e Charles West
April 2022
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Journal article
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Reti Medievali Rivista
46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4610 Library and Information Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies
How did the Feudal Economy Work? the Economic Logic of Medieval Societies
April 2021
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Journal article
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Past & Present
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Afterword
April 2019
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Chapter
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Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050-1250, Volume I: Material Resources
The Power of Property: Land Tenure in Fāṭimid Egypt
January 2019
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Journal article
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Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Medieval history and theory: a conversation
October 2018
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Journal article
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Rethinking History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Some concluding observations
January 2018
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Journal article
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Archeologia Medievale
This conclusion surveys all eighteen articles, focussing on the period 700-900 and then 900-1200; it discusses the relation of amphora distributions to Byzantine army-supply and commerce.
Jiangnan style: Doing global economic history in the medieval period
January 2017
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Chapter
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History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century
Building on impressive new research into the concept of a ‘global middle ages’, this chapter offers insights into how economic formations developed around the world. Drawing on new research on both Chinese and Mediterranean economies in the ‘medieval’ period, it compares structures of economy and exchange in very different parts of the world. The point of such comparisons is not simply to find instances of global economic flows but to understand the logic of medieval economic activity and its intersections with power and culture; and, in so doing, to remind historians that economic structures, transnational connections, and the imbrications of economy and politics do not arrive only with modernity, nor is the shape of the ‘modern’ global economy the only pattern known to humankind.
Richard Hodges: An intellectual appreciation
January 2017
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Chapter
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Encounters, Excavations and Argosies: Essays for Richard Hodges
I have often disagreed with Richard Hodges, and I still do. For his part, he has disagreed with me equally often. This good-natured sparring, between friends, has gone on in one-to-one argument, in public discussion, and in print for nearly forty years, since we worked together in Molise in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it will, I hope, long continue. We disagree over detail, and over theoretical and middle-range economic models; but the heart of our disagreement is that I cannot and will not, however many forays I make into the field of archaeology, stop thinking like a….
The other transition: From the ancient world to feudalism
January 2017
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Chapter
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Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam
Much Analysis of the Congeries of Changes that is Generally known as the “end of the ancient world in the west” – or some similar name – has been harmed by considerable lack of clarity as to what is actually meant by the phrase. The concept of the end of antiquity of course means different things to different sorts of historians, but many speak of it as if these different things all coexisted equally, intermingled in some giant classical bran-tub. Graeco-Roman paganism, secular Latin literature, temples, the emperor, the senate, slavery, togas. Feudalism was already present in the Roman empire as a subsidiary economic system long before the Germans came, and indeed in so far as the German invaders had such things as a landed aristocracy, these largely resulted from Roman influence. In the west, Europe was faced with the degradations, but also the possibilities, of feudalism.
Looking forward: Peasant revolts in Europe, 600-1200
November 2016
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Chapter
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The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt
Conclusions
January 2016
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Journal article
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Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100
Medieval Europe
January 2016
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Book
A spirited and thought-provoking history of the vast changes that transformed Europe during the 1,000-year span of the Middle Ages The millennium between the breakup of the western Roman Empire and the Reformation was a long and hugely transformative period-one not easily chronicled within the scope of a few hundred pages. Yet distinguished historian Chris Wickham has taken up the challenge in this landmark book, and he succeeds in producing the most riveting account of medieval Europe in a generation. Tracking the entire sweep of the Middle Ages across Europe, Wickham focuses on important changes century by century, including such pivotal crises and moments as the fall of the western Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s reforms, the feudal revolution, the challenge of heresy, the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, the rebuilding of late medieval states, and the appalling devastation of the Black Death. He provides illuminating vignettes that underscore how shifting social, economic, and political circumstances affected individual lives and international events. Wickham offers both a new conception of Europe’s medieval period and a provocative revision of exactly how and why the Middle Ages matter.
Debate on Azar Gat's Nations
July 2015
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Journal article
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Nations and Nationalism
Sleepwalking into a New World
January 2015
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Book
Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world.
Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176.
Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.
Sleepwalking into a new world: The emergence of Italian city communes in the twelfth century
January 2015
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Book
Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government-the commune-arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities-Milan, Pisa, and Rome-and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.
Administrators' time: The social memory of the early medieval state, east and west
January 2015
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Chapter
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Islamic History and Civilization
Books of the year
December 2014
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Journal article
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History Today
Medieval Rome
November 2014
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Book
The ‘Feudal Revolution’ and the origins of italian city communes
October 2014
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Journal article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
This article takes two major moments of social change in central medieval Europe, the ‘feudal revolution’ in France and the origins of Italian city communes, in order to see what they have in common. They are superficially very different, one rural one urban, and also one whose analysts focus on the breakdown of political power and the other on its construction or reconstruction; but there are close parallels between the changes which took place in France around 1000 or 1050 and those which took place in Italy around 1100. The contrast in dates does not matter; what matters is that in each case larger-scale political breakdown (whether at the level of the kingdom or the county) was matched by local recomposition, the intensification or crystallisation of local power structures which had been much more ad hoc before, and which would be the basic template for local power henceforth. In Italy, the main focus of the article, the different experiences of Pisa and Genoa are compared, and the development of urban assemblies first, consular collectives second, communal institutions third, are all analysed from this perspective, as guides to how the city communes of the peninsula developed, however haltingly and insecurely. The article finishes with a brief comment on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
SBTMR
Open access journals in Humanities and Social Science
April 2014
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Book
Postwar tales of two cities: Rubble films from Berlin and Munich
March 2014
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Journal article
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Film Criticism
Conclusions
January 2013
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Chapter
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Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100
Memories of Underdevelopment: What Has Marxism Done for Medieval History, and What Can It Still Do?
January 2012
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Chapter
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Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century
This chapter examines the medieval history of Europe within the context of Marxism, discussing the changes in class conflicts and their role in determining the socio-economic developments of European countries. It determines the historical contributions Marxism has made to medieval history and the future challenges it has to face. The chapter focuses on Marxist medieval history, which was dominated by the three strands of production in agrarian and feudal societies: slave plantations, peasant farming, and wage labour. ccc
Getting justice in twelfth-century Rome
October 2011
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Chapter
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Zwischen Pragmatik und Performanz. Dimensionen Mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur
The volume presents essays dealing with a wide range uses of the written word during the Middle Ages, from the Carolingian era to late medieval Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Burgundy.
Rethinking Otto III - Or not
February 2011
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Journal article
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History Today
The financing of Roman city politics, 1050-1150
January 2011
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Chapter
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Europa e Italia. Studi in onore di Giorgio Chittolini
The Problems of Comparison
January 2011
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Journal article
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HISTORICAL MATERIALISM-RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MARXIST THEORY
comparative method, fiscal system, peasant-mode of production, forces of production, coloni
Tributary Empires: Late Rome and the Arab Caliphate
January 2011
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Chapter
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Tributary Empires in Global History
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5004 Religious Studies
Archaeology and rural worlds: Settlement patterns and economic development
December 2010
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Journal article
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Archeologia Medievale
This article surveys the articles on settlement in the central middle ages in Italy which are presented in this issue. It discusses the pacing of the major changes in rural settlement in Italy between the tenth and the thirteenth century, and the general issue of macro-economic change. It argues that the articles presented here - but also much other recent work - tend to down-grade the importance of the tenth century (with the earliest 'incastellamento') as the major change in Italian settlement patterns. Instead, the twelfth century presents itself as the moment of most important change, with the appearance of stone housing, signorial quarters, and much more developed defensive systems. The twelfth century is thus in this respect the first major period of rural investment in most of Italy. This fits with the growth of signorial power in general in this century; it also fits with the growing evidence - even if so far incomplete - that it is the twelfth century which sees the major moment of Italy's economic take-off in the middle ages.
Conclusion
September 2010
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Chapter
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The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages
A pioneering volume on the culture of gift in the medieval period from Anglo-Saxon England to the Islamic world.
History
The Inheritance of Rome
August 2010
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Book
A prize-winning historian provides a detailed overview of the Dark Ages, including information on the Byzantine and Ottonian empires, as well as the Goths, Franks and Vikings, and sheds light on the development of culture and political ...
History
Historical Transitions: A Comparative Approach
January 2010
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Journal article
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MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL
MEDIEVAL WALES AND EUROPEAN HISTORY
January 2010
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Journal article
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WELSH HISTORY REVIEW
The Sense of the Past in Italian Communal Narratives
January 2010
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Chapter
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The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe
La struttura della proprietà fondiaria nell’agro romano, 900-1150
January 2009
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Journal article
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Archivio della società romana di storia patria
Report on «Distinguishing, separating, dividing borders in the Italian medieval countrysides«
December 2008
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Journal article
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Quaderni Storici
Past and Present 's Two Hundredth Issue
August 2008
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Journal article
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Past & Present
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Productive forces and the economic logic of the feudal mode of production
January 2008
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Journal article
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HISTORICAL MATERIALISM-RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MARXIST THEORY
feudal, productive forces, relations of production, middle ages
Regarding a "distinguishing, separating, sharing. Borders in the medieval Italian countryside", edited by Paola Guglielmotti
January 2008
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Journal article
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QUADERNI STORICI
Value of the words: On Ernst Jandl's surface translation
December 2007
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Journal article
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Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift
As one of the more inventive practitioners of concrete poetry, Ernst Jandl explored potentialities of meaningful sound both within German and across language boundaries. His oberflächenübersetzung takes a well-known English poem from the Romantic era and renders its acoustic surface using German words. The result is an exercise in literary and linguistic experimentation that poses questions about the value of words and stimulates attempts at decoding in an array of intersecting contexts. This short paper probes some of the dimensions that illuminate and are illuminated by Jandl's text and concludes that what appears to be a mechanistic project is in fact dependent on creative choices. Far from being simply a game of surfaces, oberflächenübersetzung invokes levels of signification that are unexpectedly profound.
Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century
June 2007
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Book
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 36 Creative Arts and Writing
Editorial
August 2006
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Journal article
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Past & Present
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Framing the Early Middle Ages
September 2005
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Book
The Mediterranean around 800: On the Brink of the Second Trade Cycle
January 2004
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Conference paper
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Dumbarton Oaks Papers
4703 Language Studies, 4704 Linguistics, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies
Edoardo Grendi and material culture
August 2002
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Journal article
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Quaderni Storici
Edoardo Grendi was always interested in the field of material culture, which is a much wider one than it was twenty years ago. By now, the problematic of the field has come to be focused on the relationship between objects - whether archaeological or «artistic» - and cultural representations, the latter normally available through the analysis of written texts. Grendi was always very involved in the construction of a cultural history that was attentive to the materiality of things, and thus this field fits his own interests. The problems of how to construct a proper analysis of material culture are further focused on here through a discussion of the relationship between medieval history and archaeology.
Medieval studies and the British School at Rome
November 2001
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Journal article
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Papers of the British School at Rome
4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
SHORTER NOTICES
November 1997
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Journal article
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The English Historical Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Derecho y práctica legal en las comunas urbanas italianas del siglo XII: el caso de pisa
January 1997
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Journal article
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Hispania
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
SHORTER NOTICES
February 1996
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Journal article
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The English Historical Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
SHORTER NOTICES
February 1996
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Journal article
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The English Historical Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe
December 1992
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Journal article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
THE OLD, THE NEW AND AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE APPEAL OF ‘MUNDARTDICHTUNG’
July 1982
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Journal article
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German Life and Letters
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4703 Language Studies, 4705 Literary Studies
Historical and Topographical Notes on Early Mediaeval South Etruria
November 1978
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Journal article
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Papers of the British School at Rome
4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
