Local Societies, Micropolitics, and Writing in the Early Middle Ages

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Extent: 350 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Medieval Studies

Series: The Medieval Countryside

Language: English

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(January 2027)

ISBN: 9782503612164

Price: $125.00

Combining social history and manuscript studies, this book explores the role of micropolitics in local societies in the ninth to eleventh centuries and how we can understand them through the mediation of writing.


Micropolitics was a constitutive dimension of early medieval local societies: a repertoire of everyday political practices rooted in place, through which individuals, families, clienteles, and other collectives negotiated access to resources, status, justice, and ecclesiastical spaces. These practices unfolded in privileged settings — churches, meeting places, and territories — and were intertwined with, yet not reducible to, royal and lordly horizons. In the ninth to eleventh centuries, the progressive assertion of overarching powers reshaped these local arenas, often through interventions that had to adapt to local conditions and did not necessarily settle disputes decisively. This volume approaches micropolitics through a sustained dialogue between Social History and Manuscript Studies, asking how local dynamics became visible in writing, and how documentary production, use, and preservation conditioned what can be known. Using conflict as a privileged window, the case studies examine landscapes, churches, violence, and collective action, with particular attention to the ways texts were mobilised, contested, and manipulated in local struggles.