HIS32800 History from below: Rural life in the middle ages

Academic Year 2024/2025

That lives of the ordinary women and men, who comprised the bulk of early medieval society, are not as well represented in the contemporary sources or in the academic literature as the lives of those who belonged to political or ecclesiastical elites. These ordinary 'peasants', as they are often called in the historiographical jargon, nevertheless played an important part in driving economies and shaping identities in Europe and around the Mediterranean. This module will examine the evidence, mainly written but also archaeological, for peasant communities and their lived reality. The perspective will alternate between the macro and the micro: between grand narratives of servile emancipation in the late Roman Empire and the more focused day-to-day realities of peasant life. We will learn about freedom and servitude, living conditions, climate, public health, social and economic obligations, social mobility, gender roles, and historiographical interpretations. The module will be divided thematically as well as regionally, concentrating on different parts of Europe and the Mediterranean, from Ireland, through Spain and the Carolingian empire to Egypt.