Chris Wickham

A prizewinning historian provides a detailed overview of the Dark Ages, including information on the Byzantine and Ottonian empires, as well as the Goths, Franks, and Vikings, and sheds light on the development of culture and political thought in Europe.

A History of Europe from 400 to 1000

The Inheritance of Rome

Chapter nine 1204: the failure of alternatives -- chapter ten Defining society: gender and community in late medieval Europe -- chapter eleven Money, war and death, 1350-1500 -- chapter twelve Rethinking politics, 1350-1500 -- chapter thirteen Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Medieval Europe

In the most ambitious and ground-breaking survey of the early middle ages ever written, Chris Wickham moves away from the fragmentary tendency to view the history of the period as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. Instead he provides a comparative history of the years 400-800 systematically analysing each of the regions of the early middle ages, from Denmark to Egypt. In doing so he creates a framework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe that is both innovative and authoritative.

Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800

Framing the Early Middle Ages

A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought. This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.

Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180

The Donkey and the Boat

A spirited history of the changes that transformed Europe during the 1,000-year span of the Middle Ages: “A dazzling race through a complex millennium.”—Publishers Weekly The millennium between the breakup of the western Roman Empire and the Reformation was a long and hugely transformative period—one not easily chronicled within the scope of a few hundred pages. Yet distinguished historian Chris Wickham has taken up the challenge in this landmark book, and he succeeds in producing the most riveting account of medieval Europe in a generation. Tracking the entire sweep of the Middle Ages across Europe, Wickham focuses on important changes century by century, including such pivotal crises and moments as the fall of the western Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s reforms, the feudal revolution, the challenge of heresy, the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, the rebuilding of late medieval states, and the appalling devastation of the Black Death. He provides illuminating vignettes that underscore how shifting social, economic, and political circumstances affected individual lives and international events—and offers both a new conception of Europe’s medieval period and a provocative revision of exactly how and why the Middle Ages matter. “Far-ranging, fluent, and thoughtful—of considerable interest to students of history writ large, and not just of Europe.”—Kirkus Reviews, (starred review) Includes maps and illustrations

James Fentress

La memoria es un tema tan amplio que su tratamiento completo abarcaría de la psicología a la filosofía, de la neurología a la historia moderna y de la zoología a la «petite madeleine» de Proust. De forma más modesta, este libro se limita a dos tareas. La primera es mostrar cómo funciona la memoria y la segunda es contemplar de modo crítico cómo los historiadores y los científicos sociales la han considerado y utilizado como herramienta de investigación, y sugerir diversos aspectos en los que una mejor apreciación del carácter de su material produciría resultados más convincentes.

Memoria social

Inge Lyse Hansen

This book is a major reassessment of the archaeological and documentary evidence for the economic history of eighth-century Europe and the Mediterranean.

The Long Eighth Century

A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.

The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century

Sleepwalking into a New World

The Prospect of Global History takes a new approach to the study of global history, seeking to apply it rather than advocate it. The volume seeks perspectives on history from East Asian and Islamic sources as well as European ones and insists on depth in historical analysis. The Prospect of Global History will speak to those interested in medieval and ancient history as well as modern history. Chapters range from historical sociology to economic history, from medieval to modern times, from European expansion to constitutional history, and from the United States across South Asia to China.

The Prospect of Global History

'Medieval Rome' analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major changes in the city. It takes the urban economy, the social history of the different strata of society, the articulation between the city's regions and the cultural identity of Rome as seen in its processions, its material culture, its legal transformations and its sense of the past. These are the underpinnings of a major reinterpretation of the city's political history in the era of the 'reform papacy', one of the greatest crises in Rome's history.

Chris Wickham

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