Local Societies, Micropolitics, and Writing in the Early Middle Ages

Micropolitics was a constitutive dimension of early medieval local societies: a repertoire of everyday political practices rooted in place, through which individuals, families, clienteles, and other collectives negotiated access to resources, status, justice, and ecclesiastical spaces. These practices unfolded in privileged settings — churches, meeting places, and territories — and were intertwined with, yet not reducible to, royal and lordly horizons. In the ninth to eleventh centuries, the progressive assertion of overarching powers reshaped these local arenas, often through interventions that had to adapt to local conditions and did not necessarily settle disputes decisively.

This volume approaches micropolitics through a sustained dialogue between Social History and Manuscript Studies, asking how local dynamics became visible in writing, and how documentary production, use, and preservation conditioned what can be known. Using conflict as a privileged window, the case studies examine landscapes, churches, violence, and collective action, with particular attention to the ways texts were mobilised, contested, and manipulated in local struggles.

Introduction
IÑAKI MARTÍN VISO and AINOA CASTRO CORREA

Part 1. Arenas

Documentary Production and Local Societies in Northern Portugal in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Two Case Studies from the Monastery of Moreira da Maia.
FRANCISCO JOSÉ ÁLVAREZ LÓPEZ

Decaniae as Builders of Monastic Domain at Local Level: The Case of Celanova Abbey and its Territory in Early Middle Ages
ALEJANDRO POMBO RIAL

Writing and Society in El Bierzo: Graphic Production and Reflection of Society (Tenth-Eleventh Centuries)
PABLO DE LA PINTA RODRÍGUEZ

Power Creep. Micropolitics and Social Mobility in the Liébana Valley (Cantabria, Spain), Tenth Century
LEONOR BAEZA GOMARIZ

Part 2. Actors

The Count of Flanders and the Urban Communities, from Sithiu to Saint-Omer. Local Societies and Micropolitics in the Northern Kingdom of West Francia between the Late Ninth and Tenth Centuries
ADRIEN BAYARD

Individual Obligations, Vanishing Communities, and the Public Power: Italy, Eighth-Ninth Centuries
VITO LORÉ

Early Carolingian Statehood and Micropolitics in Eighth-Century Alemannia: The Case of the County of Thurgau
BERNHARD ZELLER

Local Societies, Conflicts, and Micropolitics in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula (Tenth-Eleventh Centuries)
MARIEL PÉREZ

Part 3. Conflicts

Stealing Clothes, Contesting Status: The Micropolitics of Social Differentiation in Early Medieval Localities in Northwest Iberia
ÁLVARO CARVAJAL CASTRO

Getting Away with Murder in the Carolingian Empire: The View from the Charters
CHARLES WEST

Writing in the Conflicts over Property and Control of the Local Religious Centres in Galicia (Tenth-Twelfth Centuries): Users, Aims, and Strategies
DANIEL SÁNCHEZ JUSTO

Index