Recentering Medieval Europe: The Periphery Made Central

Abstract

The picture we carry in our minds of medieval Europe is one based around an image of England write large. Centralization, bureaucratization, primogeniture, and many more ideas are considered to be normative for medieval Europe because they happen or have been perceived to happen for England. The flip side of this, however, is that polities which do not conform to that normative model are considered abnormal. In the case of the medieval Germans this led to the development of a Sonderweg. The question this talk asks is, what if we center our concept of medieval Europe not on England, but elsewhere. In this case, I use the arc of medieval Europe, a region which stretches from Iberia to Ireland, west across Scandinavia and south through eastern Europe to include the medieval Roman Empire. The territory included comprised the majority of medieval Europe and, as it turns out, did not do things in quite the same way as England; thus reshaping our image of normativity.

The talk is part of the Interfaces Journal Lectures autumn 2023 a