Archives and Social Change in Italy, c.900-1100: the Evidence of Dispute Notices

Costambeys, MJ ORCID: 0000-0003-4201-5895 (2018) Archives and Social Change in Italy, c.900-1100: the Evidence of Dispute Notices. In: Italy and Early Medieval Europe. Papers for Chris Wickham. Oxford University Press,Oxford, pp. 261-273. ISBN 9780198777601

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Abstract

<p>Chris Wickham’s chapter on ‘Land disputes and their social framework in Lombard- Carolingian Italy’ set the tone for a generation of scholarship, revealing, like other chapters in the same book, the utility of dispute records for writing the social history of early medieval Europe. Societal changes are nowhere more obvious than in the disputes to which they give rise. It is no accident, therefore, that documents generated by law courts have been central to historiography concerned with the nature and sharpness of social change in the post-Carolingian West, to which Chris has also contributed significantly. Increasingly after <italic>c</italic>.800, however, Italian law court records look to become less useful as social documents because they come to follow a very limited number of formulaic templates, which erased any points in dispute and cast claims in court as undefended. This chapter argues that social changes can still be detected in such documents, though less through their texts than through their patterns of preservation. It shows how in two cases—the abbey of Monte Amiata and the ecclesiastical institutions in Piacenza—the shape of archives of law court documents mirrors and is related to the crystallization of local power into the hands of restricted elite groups focused on single families. In doing so it addresses the current debate, arising largely out of French examples, about the appearance and reality of a ‘transformation’ in Western society around the year 1000.</p>

Item Type:	Book Section
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	13 Aug 2018 08:49
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 01:29
DOI:	10.1093/oso/9780198777601.003.0021
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3024805