Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150

Rome in the middle ages was much more than just the city of Popes. In a new book Chris Wickham tells the story of the city 900 – 1150

Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150
Series: Oxford Studies In Medieval European History
by Chris Wickham (Author)
Oxford University Press 2014
ISBN-10: 0199684960
ISBN-13: 978-0199684960

ABSTRACT:

Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn’t merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city’s processions, material culture, legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city’s regions.

This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome’s political history in the era of the ‘reform papacy’, one of the greatest crises in Rome’s history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a half centuries of Rome’s history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Grand Narratives
2. The Countryside and the City
3. The Urban Economy
4. Urban Aristocracies
5. Medium élites and Church Clientèles: The Society of Rome’s Regions in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
6. The Geography of Ritual and Identity
7. The Crisis, 1050-1150
Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford. He taught at Birmingham for nearly thirty years before coming to Oxford as Chichele Professor in 2005. He has travelled to Rome for short and long research visits over a hundred times and written several books on the economy and society of Medieval Italy