Innovations, transmissions and transformations had profound spatial, economic and social impacts on the environments, landscapes and habitats evident at micro- and macro-levels. This volume explores how these changes affected how land was worked, how it was organized, and the nature of buildings and rural complexes.

Between 1200 and 1520 medieval English society went through a series of upheavals: this was an age of war, pestilence and rebellion. This book explores the realities of life of the people who lived through those stirring times. It looks in turn at aristocrats, peasants, townsmen, wage-earners and paupers, and examines how they obtained their incomes and how they spent them. This revised edition (1998) includes a substantial new concluding chapter and an updated bibliography.

Kings, aristocrats, peasants, and the Church are among the shared features of most early medieval societies. However, these also varied dramatically in time and space. Can petty regional kings, for instance, be compared to those in charge of a whole empire? Scale is a crucial factor in modelling, explaining, and conceptualizing the past. Furthermore, many issues that historians and archaeologists treat independently can be theorized together as processes of scale decrease or increase: the appearance of complex societies, the rise and collapse of empires, changing world-systems, and globalization. While a subject of much discussion in fields such as ecology, geography, and sociology, scale is rarely theorized by archaeologists and historians. This book highlights the potential of the concepts of scale and scale change for comparing and explaining medieval socio-spatial processes. It integrates regional and temporal variations in the fragmentation of the Roman world and the emergence of medieval polities, which are often handled separately by late antique and early medieval specialists. The result of a three-year research project, the nine case studies in this volume offer fresh insights into early medieval rural society while combining their individual subjects to generate a wider explanatory framework.

This volume brings together a series of papers at Kalamazoo as well as some contributed papers inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), a slim study which catalyzed the study of technology in the Middle Ages in the English-speaking world. While the initial reviews and decades-long fortune of the volume have been varied, it is still in print and remains a touchstone of an idea and a time. The contributors to the volume, therefore, both investigate the book itself and its fate, and look at new research furthering and inspired by White’s work. The book opens with an introduction surveying White’s career, with a bibliography of his work, as well as some opening thoughts on the study of medieval technology in the last fifty years. Three papers then deal explicitly with the reception and longevity of his work and its impact on medieval studies more generally. Then five papers look at new cast studies areas where White’s work and approach has had a particular impact, namely, medieval technology studies and medieval rural/ ecological studies.

The nineteen essays in this collection reflect the importance of change as an aspect of medieval society. They are arranged in six subject areas: Communities; Reformers; Careers, Rank, and Power; The Communication of Ideas; Money; and Views of Society.

Medieval feudal society was built on a sociopolitical and economic system guided by feudalism and the transcendental views of Christianity. Both of these institutions were put to the test during the Black Death epidemic, the deadliest disaster humankind has suffered, given the population of the time. Without a doubt, this event revolutionized medieval society in every way and accelerated a process of change that had been brewing for centuries.But the impact of the plague went well beyond loss of life. It fatally wounded the spiritual, social and economic foundations of the medieval world, to such an extent that one could shift the traditional timeline and mark 1347, the year the plague began, as the true end of the Middle Ages. We can read many statistics on the economic and demographic impact of the Black Death in Europe, but nothing reflects the ordeal better than the painting, “The Triumph of Death,” by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. We cannot help but shudder at the helplessness and despair of these people trying in vain to escape their fate. Peasants, nobles, priests, kings, and bishops, all made equal by death, while armies of skeletons chase after them, proclaiming the end of times. In the face of an ordered, hierarchal medieval society, this painting shows us chaos, disorder and equality in death. In this book, I will attempt to summarize, first, how the Church and feudalism were the bases of medieval society, then in the following chapters describe the principal economic, social, and spiritual effects of the plague and how Europe was changed forever.

Conflict is defined here broadly and inclusively as an element of social life and social relations. Its study encompasses the law, not just disputes concerning property, but wider issues of criminality, coercion and violence, status, sex, sexuality and gender, as well as the phases and manifestations of conflict and the behaviors brought to bear on it. It engages, too, with the nature of the transformation spanning the Carolingian period, and its implications for the meanings of power, violence, and peace. Conflict in Medieval Europe represents the 'American school' of the study of medieval conflict and social order. Framed by two substantial historiographical and conceptual surveys of the field, it brings together two generations of scholars: the pioneers, who continue to expand the research agenda; and younger colleagues, who represent the best emerging work on this subject. The book therefore both marks the trajectory of conflict studies in the United States and presents a set of original, highly individual contributions across a shifting conceptual range, indicative of a major transition in the field.

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these ‘eternal’ lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief.