Archaeologists and historians working in southern and northern Europe, explore diverse evidence — from landscape and burial archaeology to charters and chronicles — to discuss the relationships that constituted neighbourhoods and roles these played in the processes of state formation that can be observed in the peripheries of the Frankish world.

The book is concerned with arguably the single harshest subsistence crisis in Europe in the last two millennia: the Great Famine of 1315-17.

The idea of natural law, which has ancient roots in the Stoic philosophical heritage and in the Roman legal tradition, is the subject of a large and complex process of elaboration which starts in the end of the 11th century and goes up to the age of the great scholastic authors.