Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150(Oxford Studies in Medieval European History)

Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn't merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city's processions, material culture, legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city's regions. This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's political history in the era of the 'reform papacy', one of the greatest crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a half centuries of Rome's history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.

Table of Contents:
1. Grand Narratives ; 2. The Countryside and the City ; 3. The Urban Economy ; 4. Urban Aristocracies ; 5. Medium elites and Church Clienteles: The Society of Rome's Regions in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ; 6. The Geography of Ritual and Identity ; 7. The Crisis, 1050-1150 ; Bibliography

About the Author :
Chris Wickham taught at Birmingham for nearly thirty years before coming to Oxford as Chichele Professor in 2005. He has travelled to Rome for short and long research visits over a hundred times.

Review :
Wickham's books are always detailed, thorough, challenging and rewarding, and Medieval Rome is an important assessment of the city and its people and its workings -- economic and cultural, much less religious -- across the span of c AD 900-1150, a complex period of urban instability to regeneration and redefinition. a breathtaking book... Wickham is the most ambitious and provocative of medieval historians. This book is quite revolutionary in reframing the study of medieval Rome as a social history of its people and their places, with the pope as the bishop of diocese. inspiring ... a masterly example of comparative history, in which similarities and differences between Rome and other Italian cities are carefully weighed and interpreted ... [a] marvellous book Certainly this book is an achievement. It is very learned and refers equitably to a huge amount of scholarship about Rome ... Moreover, Wickham is more methodologically self-conscious than most medievalists, and aware of why and how historiographies have developed. the sophistication of his arguments will appeal to a specialist audience, but the clear, conversational style and lack of jargon, coupled with his obvious grasp of the evidence and historiography, make both of these volumes accessible to nonspecialists. Wickham's passion for medieval Italian urban history comes across on every page. Wickham sets out to tell the history of medieval Rome from scratch, starting with landscape and geography and determining the relationship between city and countryside. He has reviewed every document from the period, re-examining property transactions, legal cases, chronicle accounts and letters. In so doing, he has revealed some not-unforeseen biases in the state of our knowledge and set out to correct them ... Wickhams book makes clear that medieval Rome should not be taken as exceptional; it must be analysed like any other city, with attention to its economy, aristocracy and intellectual life and how the confines of the urban environment charged alliances and enmities. offer[s] impressive contributions to the field of medieval Italian history. Wickham's careful reading of and deep insights into a vast and complex historiography make these two works required reading ... form[s] a new foundation for Italian medieval studies. a work that offers a mine of evidence and rich interpretation on one of the most complex cities imaginable. this book is a model for the socio-political history of a premodern city, written in a direct and enjoyable manner.