Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages

Download or read book Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages written by Marc Bloch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marc Bloch was one of the founders of social history, if by that is meant the history of social organization and relations to contrast to the more conventional histories of political elites and diplomatic relations. His great monographs in medieval history are well known, but his original articles have been difficult to obtain. The present collection of essays explores the dimensions of servitude in medieval Europe. The typical political relations of that era were those of feudalism--the hierarchical relations of juridically free men. The feudal superstructure was based on a foundation of unfree masses composed of people of differing degrees of servility. In these articles Marc Bloch focussed on the heterogeneous world of slaves and serfs, concertrating particularly on the causes for its growth in the Carolingian period and its decline in the thirteenth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.