Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe

Download or read book Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe written by Stephen D. White and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-07 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum (the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France). The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They analyze Latin and Old French discourses that medieval nobles used to construct their relationships with kin, lords, men, and friends, and investigate the political dimensions of such relationships with particular reference to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, and feuding. In so doing, the essays call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for studying them.