Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800

"Partly just because it’s written by one of the most inspiring historians I know—many of us have been taught by Chris Wickham and felt immensely inspired and supported by him—and partly because it’s a model of what we should all aspire to, though virtually none of us will ever achieve. What he does is draw from an astonishingly wide range of sources—written, material and archaeological—and put together an extraordinarily wide-ranging survey of historiography of the early Middle Ages. The book ranges from Denmark to Palestine and Egypt. He constructs an utterly compelling and original argument about what Europe might have looked like after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the effects of what was a cataclysmic set of events. But, at the same time, he resists any temptation to produce anything that’s even remotely teleological, or to try and fit a hugely complex picture into a single overarching argument. So, while the book’s very coherent, at the same time, it really does what it says on the tin, in the sense that this is about framing: it’s about coming up with a set of concepts and a set of hermeneutic frames that enable us to think about the kinds of changes which are happening. And all this is achieved through rich and detailed comparisons between regions. Part of the overall point of the book is about the fragmentation and diversification of what’s happening across the early Middle Ages. That point can be made by really fine-tuned comparisons between what’s happening in different regions. Politically, but also socially, economically and demographically. All the systems that one might want to describe in a previous period fragmenting so that one sees a very, very different picture of what society looked like in different places. For example, he’s extremely interested in fiscality and tax. He looks in great detail at the ways in which taxation occurred in many different areas of Europe and beyond. It looked wildly different. Then he draws out the implications of that: how one might think about states, how one might think about what political power can achieve in different regions—all because fiscality starts to look so different in different regions, in a way that it hadn’t in a Roman imperial context. The epilogue of The Framing of the Middle Ages really is suggesting that something quite new and different is happening at that point. It’s not a reconstitution of the Roman Empire in any way, but at the same time there is a kind of pulling together of ways of thinking and of structures of society, which really does mark quite a turning point. In terms of its methodology, what’s really appealing about this book is the way he resists the temptation to homogenize and pull together an overarching argument, as well as his very detailed comparative work. From a more personal perspective, what I like about the way in which he presents early medieval society is the fluidity of categories that he presents. He says, “Titles and social labels were usually vaguer, and often little more than ad hoc status markers, which could be claimed, negotiated over, rather than assigned according to a set of rules.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Chris Wickham’s work in general on thinking about how law works is very inspiring in terms of the anthropological flexibility of his approach. What comes across about the early Middle Ages is not only which categories are being developed, but also the fact that they’re being developed in such flexible negotiable, processive ways. One of the things that I think is most interesting about law more generally is the way in which law tries, on the face of it, to construct generalizing categories, or put society into black and white boxes; to say that we can understand a certain kind of behaviour in this particular way. Of course, human behaviour and societies are so much more complex than that. Hence the rise of equity in the later period, a sense that the messy complexity of life always spills out of those categories. What emerges from Chris Wickham’s book is a really appealing sense that in the early Middle Ages people were acutely aware of that. People can’t be boxed straightforwardly into a set of categories which are homogenized across Europe."