Conflict is defined here broadly and inclusively as an element of social life and social relations. Its study encompasses the law, not just disputes concerning property, but wider issues of criminality, coercion and violence, status, sex, sexuality and gender, as well as the phases and manifestations of conflict and the behaviors brought to bear on it. It engages, too, with the nature of the transformation spanning the Carolingian period, and its implications for the meanings of power, violence, and peace. Conflict in Medieval Europe represents the 'American school' of the study of medieval conflict and social order. Framed by two substantial historiographical and conceptual surveys of the field, it brings together two generations of scholars: the pioneers, who continue to expand the research agenda; and younger colleagues, who represent the best emerging work on this subject. The book therefore both marks the trajectory of conflict studies in the United States and presents a set of original, highly individual contributions across a shifting conceptual range, indicative of a major transition in the field.

This title traces the logic of urban political conflict in late medieval Europe's most heavily urbanised regions, Italy and the Southern Low Countries, revealing how conflict in these regions gave rise to a distinct form of political organisation.

This volume seeks to increase understanding of the origins, ideology, implementation, impact, and historiography of religion and conflict in the medieval and early modern periods. The chapters examine ideas about religion and conflict in the context of text and identity, church and state, civic environments, marriage, the parish, heresy, gender, dialogues, war and finance, and Holy War. The volume covers a wide chronological period, and the contributors investigate relationships between religion and conflict from the seventh to eighteenth centuries ranging from Byzantium to post-conquest Mexico. Religious expressions of conflict at a localised level are explored, including the use of language in legal and clerical contexts to influence social behaviours and the use of religion to legitimise the spiritual value of violence, rationalising the enforcement of social rules. The collection also examines spatial expressions of religious conflict both within urban environments and through travel and pilgrimage. With both written and visual sources being explored, this volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of religion and military, political, social, legal, cultural, or intellectual conflict in medieval and early modern worlds.

Referring, by way of example, to the chronicler's story about a dynastic conflict in medieval Poland, this book offers an insight into the modes of using ritual as an effective tool of political action in the Middle Ages—both in the practice of political entreprising, and on the level of narrative information about that practice—and then reflects about the nature of the relationship between the reality of the written account and the reality of the practical activities described in it. It demonstrates the ways in which the reality of the narrative account and the reality of practics—ritual-in-text and ritual-in-performance—overlaid and interlaced one another, and exercised a mutual impact, thereby jointly creating a framework within which, in the earlier and high Middle Ages, political activity took place.

In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages, Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or as late as 1800 CE, an age shaped by climate change and pandemics at both ends. Examining armed conflict at all levels, and ranging across China and the central Asian steppes to southwest Asia, western Europe, and beyond, Morillo explores the technological, social, cultural, and environmental determinants of warfare and the tools and tactics used by warriors on land and at sea. Part I explains the geographical, political, and technological rules that shaped patterns of military activity everywhere. Part II explores how these rules played out in various historical contexts. Armed conflict played a central role in the making of the medieval world, and medieval people used war and conflict to create, expand, and defend their communities and identities. But the devastating effects of climate change and epidemic disease continually reshaped these communities and the nature of their conflicts. Broad in its scope and rich in detail, War and Conflict in the Middle Ages will be the go-to guide for students and aficionados of military history, medieval history, and global history.

The conflict between landlords and peasants over the appropriation of the surplus product of the peasant holding was a prime mover in the evolution of medieval society. In this collection of essays Rodney Hilton looks at the economic context within which these conflicts took place. He seeks to explain the considerable variations in the size, composition and management of landed estates and investigates the nature of medieval urbanisation, a consequence of the development of both local commodity production and long distance trade in luxury goods. By setting the broader economic context – the nature of the peasant and landlord economies and the commercialisation of peasant production – Hilton's essays enable a thorough understanding of the relationship between landlords and peasants in medieval society.

Examines the fundamental question of what held the societies of the post-Roman world together.