Neighbours and strangers

Neighbours and strangers investigates social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe from 700 to 1050, asking to what extent settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side - neighbours. The book offers a new approach to well-known problems of the early Middle Ages by bringing together expertise in different regions from different national traditions in a comparative framework. It discusses the basic constituents of early medieval rural societies: material dimensions, such as settlement, topography and the appropriation of resources, as well as fundamental factors that define the position of individuals within local societies and groups, such as legal status and socio-economic stratification. It examines how people in the early medieval west worked together in pursuit of shared goals beyond the level of the household, and how (and whether) they formed their own groups through that collective action. The book also explores the position of early medieval priests and their capacity to stimulate social cohesion in local communities. Finally, it treats the ways in which outside authorities, office holders from both the public and the private sphere and political elites, intervened in local society. Bernhard Zeller is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria; Charles West is Reader in Medieval History in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, UK; Francesca Tinti is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Medieval, Modern and American History at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain; Marco Stoffella is Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor in Medieval History at the University of Verona, Italy; Nicolas Schroeder is Assistant Professor in Medieval History at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Carine van Rhijn is Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands; Steffen Patzold is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of History at the University of Tübingen, Germany; Thomas Kohl is Acting Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tübingen, Germany; Wendy Davies is Professor Emerita of History at University College London and Associate Member in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, UK; Miriam Czock is Senior lecturer in the History Department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany