This collection of essays from both established and emerging scholars analyses the dynamic connections between conflict and violence in medieval Italy. The contributors present a new critique of power that sustained both kingship and locally based elite networks throughout the Italian peninsula. A broad temporal range, covering the sixth to the twelfth centuries, allows this book to cross a number of 'traditional' fault-lines in Italian historiography - 774, 888, 962 and 1025. The essays provide wide-ranging analyses of the role of conflict in the period, the operation of power and the development of communal consciousness and collective action by individuals and groups. It is thus essential reading for scholars, students and general readers who wish to understand the situation in medieval Italy.

This study concerns the Benedictine monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, a unique and important institution because it was the first monastery in Italy to be founded under the aegis of the Carolingian family (c. 879). It is the first book-length study in English of one of the most important groups of early Italian charters, a type of document now widely acknowledged to be full of information about the social history of what were once imagined to be the Dark Ages. Using detailed evidence of some 300 charters, the book develops the thesis that Sant'Ambrogio played an essential part in the development and expansion of a complex urban society at Milan in the Carolingian period because the monks touched the lives of both 'great men' and the 'new society' of notaries, merchants, judges and moneyers. By writing monastic history as the history of a relationship between monastery and society the study demonstrates that it was the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio, as much as any other institution or individual, which gave birth to a genuinely urban society. The book therefore challenges the widely-held view that urban monasteries were less important in ninth-century political history than the great rural houses such as Fulda, St Gallen, Bobbio and San Vicenzo al Volturno, and contributes a new thesis to explain the revival of towns in this period. Finally, The Lands of Saint Ambrose provides a fully-documented example of how early medieval social history can be written from a major charter group.

"Dark Age Liguria" surveys the history of the Liguria region from c. 400 to c. 1050 AD, to provide a detailed case study of what happened here as Roman imperial rule ended. The book pulls together all the surviving evidence, written, archaeological, artistic and ecological, to propose that, in contrast with later periods, Ligurians looked north as much as they gazed out to sea. Genoese history under Byzantines, Lombards, Carolingians and Ottonians is compared with that of other coastal settlements, including Albenga, Noli, Perti and Savona and the less-studied but fascinating inland valleys, the Aveto, Polcevera, Stura and Vara. The book draws also on more than fifteen years of fieldwork in and around the small town of Varese Ligure (La Spezia province) to suggest some new methods for investigating the Dark Age past.

This volume explores the nature of narrative in texts used as sources for history by modern scholars of the early medieval West. Narrative is defined here broadly as how stories are told and the volume focuses on the interaction of what texts say and with how they say it. The congruence of narrative and history is a wide subject, which can be approached in a number of ways. This volume examines four types of written source: poetry (Latin and vernacular), charters, biographical writing (hagiography and royal lives) and historical writings (histories and chronicles). These include traditional narrative sources as well as literary texts and documents not generally considered in terms of narrative. The ten studies in this volume cover a geographical range that includes the Carolingian Empire, the British Isles and Scandinavia, and from the Carolingian period through to the twelfth century.

A comprehensive survey of recent work in Medieval Italian history and archaeology by an international cast of contributors, arranged within a broader context of studies on other regions and major historical transitions in Europe, c.400 to c.1400CE. Each of the contributors reflect on the contribution made to the field by Chris Wickham, whose own work spans studies based on close archival work, to broad and ambitious statements on economic and social change in the transition from Roman to medieval Europe, and the value of comparing this across time and space.