Making Early Medieval Societies

An exceptional essay often raises as many questions as it answers. I found each paper in this volume—based on the 2005 conference, “The Peace and the Feud: History and Anthropology 1955–2005”—innovative and thought-provoking. Deftly interweaving disparate methods, time-periods, and regions, the monograph produces a fresh vision of a millennium of Western European history. Using the anthropologist Max Gluckman’s mid-twentieth century work as a pivot, Conrad Leyser’s introduction offers three primary goals. First, how do social orders stay together in places where central authority has weakened or faded altogether? Second, how does internal feuding represent not as a sign of disorder, but as a symbol of social vigor? Third, how does Christianity’s enduring social authority help to explain the post-imperial West’s birth and eventual rise? Kate Cooper reconsiders the impact of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 on the Empire’s social and power structures. Rather than employing the top-down approach favored in most scholarship on imperial Christianity, Cooper contemplates the role of public and private social networks in these developments. Arguing that the late Roman government was more reactive than active in its policies towards the fourth-century church, Cooper proposes that the increasing puissance of bishops stemmed primarily from the “informal relationships between bishops and prominent landowners” (27). Yet, a shift to collective property ownership by the Church led to a rivalry between bishops and lay landowners for social and political authority.

Archaeology · Bishops · Christianity · Feud · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rivalry · Scholarship · Sociology · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History