Framing the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

Chris Wickham's important intervention in debates about the transformation of the Roman world from the fifth century onwards presents a vast array of evidence about the nature of social relations, the economy and the late-Roman and early-medieval state across the Mediterranean and Western-European world. Wickham is successful in taking into account both the high level of regional variation and differentiation across the Roman world and, at the same time, the various key unifying elements which bound these regions together. But, in arguing that the nature of the fiscal apparatus and structures of extraction, redistribution and consumption of surpluses of the late-Roman state were formative in the structure and appearance of the late-Roman élites in East and West as well as in the evolution of their early-medieval successors, a number of structural tensions in the model become apparent. This discussion highlights some of the issues at stake, while, at the same time, affirming the critical importance of the book, more especially its emphasis on the structural force of late-Roman institutions and social relations for the successor-states of the early-medieval West.This substantial work -in all senses of the word 'substantial' -is the result of many years working on the structure and dynamic of medieval societies in Western Europe as well as on comparisons between such societies, their origins in the later-Roman period and, perhaps most importantly, on the dynamics of change and transformation across the late-Roman and early-medieval world. Wickham has dealt, not only with Europe, of course, but has compared European with other social-economic and cultural areas, most notably with China and Iran, and has worked from within a broadly historical-materialist framework, in particular attempting to elucidate the causal relationships between the structures of late-ancient and medieval societies and their political histories. So he is as well qualified as any, and probably better qualified than most, to take on the challenge represented by the present volume. For 'framing