This book explores social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe from 700-1050, asking to what extent settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side - neighbours. Drawing evidence from most of the current western European countries, the book plots and interrogates the very different practices of this wide range of regions in a systematically comparative framework. Neighbours and strangers considers the variety of local responses to the supra-local agents of landlords and rulers and the impact, such as it was, of those agents on the small-scale residential group. It also assesses the impact on local societies of the values, instructions and demands of the wider literate world of Christianity, as delivered by local priests. -- .

This book explores social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe from 700-1050, asking to what extent settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side - neighbours. Drawing evidence from most of the current western European countries, the book plots and interrogates the very different practices of this wide range of regions in a systematically comparative framework. It considers the variety of local responses to the supra-local agents of landlords and rulers and the impact, such as it was, of those agents on the small-scale residential group. It also assesses the impact on local societies of the values, instructions and demands of the wider literate world of Christianity, as delivered by local priests. -- .

Using the idea that church buildings are sacred spaces, this study seeks to examine a central figure of thought in medieval society, the ecclesia . Using normative, liturgical, and exegetic-theological sources, the book traces the profound transformational process that took place in the political and religious view of society from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. The study describes the dynamics that led to the development of a ecclesiology with a powerful impact on an entire epoch."