Medieval Histories – Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages
“Oh, could I but once experience what it felt like to live in a medieval castle”, a renowned medievalist once confessed to me at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds.
Medieval Histories – medieval.eu – is dedicated to exploring precisely this intuition: that it is, in fact, possible to approach an understanding of how people once inhabited their worlds.
The history of the European Middle Ages stretches across a thousand years, from c. 500 to 1500. Seen from above, it is tempting to tell this history as a succession of sweeping transformations: from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the gradual consolidation of kingdoms and, eventually, nation states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It is equally tempting to explain these changes through a handful of great innovations. Literacy changed, and with it society. Latin slowly gave way to the vernaculars. Geometry was joined, and eventually challenged, by algebra. Stones and scrolls gave way to books; papyrus to parchment; parchment to paper; and finally came the Gutenberg Galaxy.
But already here the explanations begin to multiply.
We may look instead to religion and the profound transformation of a predominantly pagan world into a Christian one, shaped throughout by Judaism and, later, Islam. Or we may turn to economics: the disappearance of the Roman villa economy and slavery, followed by new forms of lordship, dependency and feudal extraction. Others will point to climate, harvest failures and epidemic catastrophes – above all plague – as the great engines of historical change.
All of these perspectives matter. But Medieval Histories approaches the past from another direction.
Medieval Microhistories
Rather than presenting history primarily as a sequence of events or transformations viewed from above, the aim is to explore how people encountered such changes in their own lives: how they understood what was happening around them, how they acted upon it, and how their choices were shaped by the worlds in which they were deeply embedded.
These worlds consisted of much more than ideas. They were made up of landscapes, houses, churches, castles, fields, roads and forests; of objects handled and inherited; of social obligations, kinship, belief, ritual, memory and law. They were also shaped by habits and assumptions so deeply ingrained that they were rarely articulated.
In short, people lived within cultural habitats.
Medieval Histories therefore seeks to reconstruct the frameworks through which medieval people acted, thought and made sense of their surroundings. The Middle Ages are not treated simply as a distant and isolated period, but as a particularly rich field in which to examine how human beings organise power, land, belief, identity and material culture – and how such arrangements change.
Each investigation begins with something specific: a person, a place, an object, a building, an image or a text. From there, larger questions emerge. How did people understand authority? What made land legitimate property? How were loyalties created and maintained? How did people distinguish the sacred from the profane? What did they believe a body, a house, a landscape or an image actually was? And what happened when such understandings began to shift?
In other words: how did people live out their lives between c. 500 and 1500?
This is why Medieval Histories is rooted in historical anthropology and cultural history. It is where medieval microhistories live: stories of individuals moving through a curious, unstable and surprisingly fluid past, caught up in transformations they could seldom see in their entirety.
The purpose is not merely to inform. It is also to use the Middle Ages as a way of thinking about how human worlds work: how people create meaning and order, how such orders become embedded in everyday life, and how they eventually change.
Perhaps this is also why the medieval world can sometimes seem unexpectedly close to our own. Not because history repeats itself, but because the twenty-first century has once again made us acutely aware of what it means to live through profound changes without knowing where they will lead.
Medieval Histories is open to all readers and offers essays, explorations, notes and reflections. It also serves as a platform for medievalists – professional as well as independent – whose work engages closely with written sources such as inscriptions, charters, laws, sermons and literature, or with material culture: architecture, sculpture, jewellery, textiles and everyday artefacts.
For readers who wish to pursue these investigations further, extended essays and ongoing series develop particular subjects in greater depth and place them within a larger, cumulative framework.
In this way, Medieval Histories seeks to build not merely a collection of articles, but a coherent body of work: a sustained exploration of how Europeans inhabited their worlds from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and how those worlds were continually made, inhabited and reconfigured.
Medieval.eu is therefore not primarily about providing sweeping overviews of the Middle Ages. It is an invitation to enter its quirky corners – to encounter lives lived, choices made, objects handled, texts read, landscapes inhabited and worlds imagined – and through them to approach, however imperfectly, the question with which we began:
What did it feel like to live there?
Please enjoy
• Essays on historical anthropological microhistories from the Middle Ages – about people & places, pieces of art, and material culture
• Reviews of exhibitions, archaeological finds, anniversaries, concerts, and musical performances
• Reviews of new books
OWNER:
Medieval Histories is owned by Medieval Histories Ltd, Paradisstien 5, DK2840 Holte, Denmark CVR: DK29934215. Medieval Histories Ltd operates the following alias’: Wilder Europe Ltd, Kulturhistorier Ltd, and Medieval.eu Ltd.
CONTACT
Karen Schousboe, Editor-in-Chief, Ethnologist and Author, Paradistien 5 DK-2840 Holte Denmark 0045 24 23 36 10 info@medieval.eu
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