Rural communities in the medieval West

When and why did a distinctive form of social organization, the community, emerge in the medieval countryside, encompass the vast majority of the population and provide the foundations on which medieval and modern society would build? In Rural Communities in the Medieval West, eminent scholar Leopold Genicot offers a panoramic view of modern scholarship on the subject with important archival, archeological and anthropological evidence. Genicot explains the different paths by which, at the village level, the various agrarian economies arrived at the threshold of early modern times. He examines rural development in the medieval West from the perspectives of geography and economics, law and politics and religion and spirituality. Well-known for his study of the Namur region of his native Belgium, Genicot compares the results from that work to the recent conclusions of scholars writing on virtually every other region of medieval Europe.

The book is also notable for Genicot's efforts to acquaint readers with the new resources available to historians of the medieval countryside - from fossilized pollens to databanks of medieval documents and terminology - and to introduce modern, non-English technical terminology. Genicot includes a concise bibliographical summary of the various positions, discussions and current knowledge in the field. Rural Communities in the Medieval West is an authoritative synthesis of the scholarly literature from continental Europe's foremost historian of the economy and society of the medieval countryside. Also includes information on aristocracy, cattle rearing, church, commons, community, crisis, custom, demography, economy, family, franchises, landed property, law, lord, money, nobility, parish prices, reclamations, rent, seigneurie, serfdom, settlement, town, vicar, villa, etc.