Social Inequality in Early Medieval Europe: Local Societies and Beyond, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo

Abstract

That inequality was common within medieval society is a well-established fact. However, it has been studied mostly in connection with the differences between quite discrete social strata: landlords and peasants, guild masters and apprentices, wealthy householders and servants. Less attention has been paid to stratification within each of these layers of medieval society, though it has become apparent from the research of the past few decades that rural society was, at least in the later Middle Ages, indeed quite differentiated. For the earlier period, despite the insights provided by careful studies of local societies by scholars such as Wendy Davies and Chris Wickham, most research has tended in general to revert to a binary—only slightly shaded with grey—of landowners and their more or less dependent tenants. The past decade or so has seen a growth of interest in the problem of social inequality, and a number of research projects have aimed to provide a more nuanced view of village societies and the differences within them. The volume under review is a major contribution that challenges the binary view of early medieval society on the basis of rigorous empirical research using both the traditional tools of the historian—written materials—and the material record and methods of archaeology; and it also provides a theoretical and methodological stimulus for new ways of approaching early medieval rural societies.