To browse Academia. Preface I should like first of all to say how happy I am to see my book La civilisation de l'Occident medieval made available to an English-speaking readership.
I have made some additions to the bibliography in the latest French edition, which came out in , and I should also like to add a few words of introduction. Out of the most significant research developments of the last years, aside from those concerning the contribution of archaeology and, in a general sense, the area of material civilization, including nutrition, the development of the history of mentalites and the use of new types of evidence, such as gestures and images, I should like to concentrate on certain fields which extend the ideas which dominated my book.
Probably the most important is the interest in the problems of the family and of kinship. Alliance systems, the role of women, and problems of consanguinity have become central themes for the understanding of feudal society. In this perspective feudo-vassalic relations are increasingly posited in terms of artificial kinship. Similarly, the formation of the lordship, a basic unit, like the family, in feudal society, has yielded ground to fertile hypotheses concerning the process of organization of society in microcosms dominated by lords.
Blackwell Companion to the Medieval World, ed. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Goff Maria Dalamaga. Medieval Civilization A. Genesis 6. The Framework of Time and Space 7. Material Culture 8. Christian Society 9. The notion of incastellamento, the creation of concentrated village settlement in the context of castle-building, proposed by Pierre Toubert for Latium, has been given a general application by Robert Fossier under the term encellulement.
The problems of the growing emergence of the individual in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, begun by the works of Walter Ullmann and Colin Morris, have been deepened by the researches of, notably, Aaron Gurevitch, Caroline Bynum and myself.
