Framing the Early Middle Ages

In the most ambitious and ground-breaking survey of the early middle ages ever written, Chris Wickham moves away from the fragmentary tendency to view the history of the period as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. Instead he provides a comparative history of the years 400-800 systematically analysing each of the regions of the early middle ages, from Denmark to Egypt. In doing so he creates aframework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe that is both innovative and authoritative.

Chris Wickham received his DPhil from Oxford in 1975. He was Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Birmingham until his appointment as Chichele Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Oxford in 2005. He has been editor of Past and Present since 1995.

a tremendous achievement, demonstrating mastery over half a dozen fields of scholarship. David Abulafia, THES Wickham's work is groundbreaking ... Some of his conclusions may and should be debated, but they rest on an array of evidence and on a series of complex atguments that further discussions should not ignore. Walter Pohl, Speculum