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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. -- .
This volume studies local priests as central players in small
communities of early medieval Europe. As clerics living among the
laity, priests played a double role within their communities: that
of local representatives of the Church and religious experts, and
that of owners of land and other goods. By virtue of their
membership of both the ecclesiastical and the secular world, they
can be considered as 'men in the middle': people who brought
politico-religious ideas and ideals to secular communities, and who
linked the local to the supra-local via networks of landownerhsip.
This book addresses both roles that local priests played by
approaching them via their manuscripts, and via the charters that
record transactions in which they were involved. Manuscripts once
owned by local priests bear witness to their education and
expertise, but also indicate how, for instance, ideals of the
Carolingian reforms reached the lowest levels of early medieval
society. The case-studies of collections of charters, on the other
hand, show priests as active members of networks of the locally
powerful in a variety of European regions. Notwithstanding many
local variations, the contributions to this volume show that local
priests as 'men in the middle' are a phenomenon shared by the early
medieval world as a whole.
The social transformation of the Roman world is a highly topical
and much-discussed subject among historians. The importance of
kinship in this epochal process has been largely neglected until
now. This compendium seeks to close this gap by examining the role
of kinship in transforming the social order. It significantly
expands our perspective on the epochal upheaval between late
antiquity and the middle ages.
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