Neighbours and strangers

Zeller, Bernhard; West, Charles; Tinti, Francesca; Stoffella, Marco; Schroeder, Nicolas; Rhijn, Carine van; Patzold, Steffen; Köhl, Thomas; Davies, Wendy; Czock, Miriam

doi:10.7765/9781526139825

Cited by 3 publications

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“…We can thus analyse how processes of polity building and collapse at low levels of social complexity may have impacted upon commons, and also how commons conditioned and fed into such processes. Importantly, early medieval Western Europe was highly fragmented, and there was great variation in local and regional socio-economic and political conditions (Wickham 2005;Zeller et al 2020). Consequently, the relevance of commons -where they had any -must have differed significantly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia

Castro

2021

International Journal of the Commons

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In 2016, M. Laborda-Pemán and T. De Moor issued a call to advance the conversation between commons scholars and historians. This paper argues that in order to further this conversation, in the case of Western Europe more attention needs to be paid to the centuries preceding the blossoming of the commons in the high Middle Ages. It focuses on NW Iberia to show that in this case, as in others, such developments need to be assessed against the processes triggered by the collapse of the Roman Empire. On the basis of the extant sources, and building upon some of the concerns of critical institutionalism, it then considers some of the theoretical avenues that could facilitate such a dialogue: addressing the multifunctional, socially embedded nature of institutions; the weight of social inequalities and power relations in their configuration and functioning; the role of conflict in the definition of norms and their transformation over time; and the discursive practices aimed at legitimising specific institutional arrangements.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia

Castro

2021

International Journal of the Commons

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Capturing the fusion of two ancestries and kinship structures in Merovingian Flanders

Sasso,

Saag,

Spros

et al. 2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The Merovingian period (5th to 8th cc AD) was a time of demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and political realignment in Western Europe. Here, we report the whole-genome shotgun sequence data of 30 human skeletal remains from a coastal Late Merovingian site of Koksijde (675 to 750 AD), alongside 18 remains from two Early to Late Medieval sites in present-day Flanders, Belgium. We find two distinct ancestries, one shared with Early Medieval England and the Netherlands, while the other, minor component, reflecting likely continental Gaulish ancestry. Kinship analyses identified no large pedigrees characteristic to elite burials revealing instead a high modularity of distant relationships among individuals of the main ancestry group. In contrast, individuals with >90% Gaulish ancestry had no kinship links among sampled individuals. Evidence for population structure and major differences in the extent of Gaulish ancestry in the main group, including in a mother–daughter pair, suggests ongoing admixture in the community at the time of their burial. The isotopic and genetic evidence combined supports a model by which the burials, representing an established coastal nonelite community, had incorporated migrants from inland populations. The main group of burials at Koksijde shows an abundance of >5 cM long shared allelic intervals with the High Medieval site nearby, implying long-term continuity and suggesting that similarly to Britain, the Early Medieval ancestry shifts left a significant and long-lasting impact on the genetic makeup of the Flemish population. We find substantial allele frequency differences between the two ancestry groups in pigmentation and diet-associated variants, including those linked with lactase persistence, likely reflecting ancestry change rather than local adaptation.

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The Early Medieval State: A Strategic‐Relational Approach

Castro

García

2022

J Historical Sociology

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The state is a contested concept in the historiography on early medieval societies. Debates have frequently revolved around its heuristic validity, but few scholars have addressed its broader theoretical implications. Those who have tend to reduce the state to its institutional features and privilege the role of the dominant groups in the analysis of state-building processes and the workings of the state. This paper contends that a richer conceptualisation of the state can overcome the limits of the debate as it has been framed so far and provide a deeper insight into how social relations shaped and were shaped by the development of early medieval polities. After reviewing the most significant historiographical contributions to the debate, the paper introduces the Strategic-Relational Approach to the state, as formulated by B. Jessop, as one that can provide a more nuanced understanding of early medieval polities. Particular emphasis is made on the analysis of class relationships and the articulation of hegemonic projects as two particularly fruitful lines of inquiry. Finally, the paper focuses on one particular instance of early medieval political practice, the politics of the land, as a means to illustrate the potential of the approach.

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Neighbours and strangers

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia

Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia

Capturing the fusion of two ancestries and kinship structures in Merovingian Flanders

The Early Medieval State: A Strategic‐Relational Approach

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