This book charts the influence of Christian ideas about social responsibility on the legal, fiscal and operational policies of the Merovingian government, which consistently depended upon the collaboration of kings and elites to succeed, and it shows how a set of stories transformed the political playing field in early medieval Gaul. Contemporary thinkers encouraged this development by writing political arguments in the form of hagiography, more to redefine the rules and resources of elite culture than to promote saints' cults. Jamie Kreiner explores how hagiographers were able to do this effectively, by layering their arguments with different rhetorical and cognitive strategies while keeping the surface narratives entertaining. The result was a subtle and captivating literature that gives us new ways of thinking about how ideas and institutions can change, and how the vibrancy of Merovingian culture inspired subsequent Carolingian developments.
Pigs seem like a minor historical subject. But they helped their caretakers think big, and they can likewise expand our picture of the early Middle Ages. Pigs forced humans to appreciate that they were dealing with interlocking, fluctuating, and variable resources that required a correspondingly flexible approach to handling them. And they were adaptive, most noticeably in their diet but also in their behaviors, which enabled their owners to take advantage of different ecologies. And unlike other livestock, pigs were consistently difficult to manage, so their caretakers could not help but notice that domestication did not fully transform animals into commodities. Humans made tradeoffs and sacrifices in order to keep raising and eating pigs, and that, more than any other animal-human relationship in this period, attests to a long-term process of coevolution.
Early medieval communities were thinking seriously about their environments. They saw themselves as part of a complex and dynamic universe that was propelled by interconnected organisms and forces. In that system, even the smallest creatures or events could have far-reaching consequences. The big picture was tied to hyperlocal circumstances. The people who lived in the early medieval West (in what is now northwest Africa and Europe) brought these perspectives to bear on their farming, policy making, and philosophizing. And pigs were both a means and a motivation for doing this. They were a flexible species that could handle a diversity of ecologies. They illustrated the benefits of being adaptable. But they were also a constant reminder that humans had to adapt to their animals and landscapes: total control or assimilation was unthinkable. Pigs were nearly everywhere in the early medieval West, and they left their hoofprints on laws, politics, philosophy, religion, and even humans’ own sense of themselves.
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