SCHOLARS WHOSE RESEARCH focuses on the study of arms and armour have tended to shy away from the analysis of literary texts as points of comparison or clarification, while scholars of knighthood in literature have likewise tended to shy away from archaeological analyses of arms, armour, and the material culture of the chivalric past as a point of reference for their own work. This apparent disconnect can be remedied by studying what I have called in another study the full materiality of medieval and renaissance chivalric culture. In the case of chivalric identity in particular, an intellectual tension can be created by seeking one identity and essentializing it through one approach. The armoured knight, while he can of course be studied from a single angle, is complex enough that the confluence of seemingly disparate approaches to the study of chivalric identity can yield results that present a more balanced overall view of what it meant to be a knight in the Middle Ages.

Chivalry as a political institution, like other political institutions that make and shape Western culture, has been treated seriously and extensively by modern scholars, and a rich bibliography of books and articles informs our knowledge and understanding of the institution. The same cannot necessarily be said of the practical and technological milieu in which the knights operated, and although they were at the epicentre of the medieval chivalric diaspora, they have often fallen victim to emotive portraits based on erroneous visions of, and assumptions about, the past. An example of this paradox can be seen in a 1998 book by Constance Brittain Bouchard on the institution of chivalry in medieval France, which is generally welldocumented, and yet when the author discusses knightly practices she perpetuates the fallacy, without any supporting evidence, that “Late medieval tournament armor was so heavy that participants often had to be hoisted onto their horses by cranes and tied into place because of the damage that would result simply from falling off.” The fact that the author does not cite a source for this assertion under scores the reality that there is no material, visual, or documentary evidence to support it, and all of the evidence that does exist, without exception, points to the exact opposite, namely, that fully armoured men-at-arms were able to mount and dismount with agility and ease.

ONE OF NORTHEASTERN Europe's major medieval historical and archaeological sites is the trading port of Staraya Ladoga, “Old” Ladoga, located on the western bank of the Volkhov River and twelve kilometres from the southern shore of Lake Ladoga in what is now Russia. This settlement remained attractive for Scandinavian traders, craftsmen, and farmers throughout the Viking Age (eighth to eleventh centuries) and probably beyond, because ships could sail from the Baltic Sea through the Gulf of Finland and into Lake Lagoda, seventy-four kilometres inland, via the Neva River. From there, they could proceed to the mouth of the Volkhov, some hundred kilometres along the southern shore of the lake.

Ladoga is mentioned several times in the Primary Chronicle of Rus’ (compiled in the early twelfth century) and in Icelandic sagas, where it is known as Aldejgjuborg. In the early eleventh century, the Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise (Mudry), ceded any regional claim on Ladoga to his wife, Princess Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden, creating a separate jarlsriki or earldom. After she died, in 1050, Ladoga became part of Novgorod territory at some point; however, this phase of its history is difficult to verify through archaeological evidence alone. In the occupation layers above wooden buildings from the mid-tenth century, glass bracelets and lead seals that are characteristic of the Early Rus’ period (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) have been discovered. Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Novgorod records that, in 1105, the Novgorodians, led by Prince Mstislav Vladimirovich “made war against Ladoga.” What, then, was the geopolitical status of Ladoga during the fifty years after Ingegerd's death?

In this article, I will argue that these finds, coupled with the chronicle's claim, should be interpreted as evidence for the end of the Ladoga jarlskiri and its autonomy, as do the finds of lead seals from Novgorod and the building of a new and larger stone fortress. Prior to that time, and perhaps even under Novogorod influence, Staraya Ladoga functioned as an important emporium of the global North.

According to dendrochronological data, the first wooden living structures at Ladoga are dated no later than 753 CE. The focal area of the settlement was situated on the lower part of the riverbank, hidden from the Volkhov by a coastal dune.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY ENDEAVOUR of mapping literature has produced multiple anthologies, articles, and infrastructure resources addressing a variety of research questions on literary cartography and spatiality. A more specific inquiry into the geographies and spatiality of medieval narrative, especially romances, has likewise gained much scholarly attention. Interestingly, these two groups of scholars have arrived at almost identical conclusions: spatial descriptions within medieval romance and other literary genres are best described as geographically opaque and vague.Moreover, such descriptive maps, for the most part, represent strings of place-names arranged in a linear fashion and thus have much in common with the mapping tradition of contemporary itineraries.In this article, I argue that it is necessary to analyze all kinds of spatial references, not only place-names, in order to gain a proper understanding of spatiality across medieval literary corpora. Furthermore, any such analysis has to include spatial constructions: that is, descriptions of the relations between spatial references, however scarce these might be, because the relational aspects of geographical descriptions give unique insight into the texts’ coordinate systems and wider medieval perceptions of geography and the surrounding world. Thus, the present article complements the existing scholarship on literary spatiality which has been heavily focused on landscapes, topography, and/or named places (especially within the literary GIS tradition) and offers a more nuanced, theoretically and methodologically informed way of approaching spatiality in a text, with or without employment of GIS (Geographic Information Systems), through the investigation of multiple categories of spatial references and spatial constructions.

This article also aims to show how geographical space is linguistically rendered in medieval texts of different genres, and what this linguistic information can reveal about perceptions of geography and space in medieval narrative. To fulfil its purpose, it will answer two research questions. First, what language resources (spatial references and spatial constructions) are used to convey spatial information in two Old Swedish texts: an original vernacular composition, Erikskrönikan (The Chronicle of Duke Erik); and a translation, Själens tröst (Consolation of the Soul)? Second, in what ways do the spatial profiles of these texts differ, and why? Are these differences persistent in other texts belonging to the same genres in the East Norse literary corpus, rhymed chronicles and devotional works respectively?

THIS QUOTATION FROM Fabrizio Cruciani expresses the efforts made in theatre studies, over the last seventy years, to create an original methodological approach no longer focused on the central position of a dramatic text, as the field has been conceived since the nineteenth century. The result of these efforts is the identification of practical methods capable of overcoming the specific contradiction of theatre studies, which is the lack of a hermeneutic object because, being an event, theatre is by its nature ephemeral. Clues can be found later, whether literary, documentary, figurative, narrative, or financial, but these cannot, in any way, restore the integrity of the event.

Unlike the description of festivities and rituals, or efforts to reconstruct archaeologically possible theatrical productions of well-known dramatic texts, always somewhat hypothetical due to the fragmentary nature of the documents, “new” theatre history, developed in Italian universities since the mid-1960s, has tried to define new links and well-conceived methodologies, while also undertaking research into production processes.

This new hermeneutic horizon gave value to the performing arts as a system and network. To this end, it is important to individualize and study the institutions that promote or support the performance, symbolic languages, procedures, modalities of communication, the use of space, and literary and figurative elaborations (recognizing the contiguous forms of expression and indoctrination developed by local political and ecclesiastical cultures: preaching, literature, and typo logy, among others). This study also includes analyzing the purpose and type of spectacle, to enhance perspectives and enlarge the quantity and quality of questions asked of the sources, rather than just analyzing the sources themselves.

The latest research into medieval and premodern theatre has contributed new cognitive elements to better understand our idea of medieval festivities. At the same time, it has made more pressing the problem of distinguishing between theatrical acts and simple rituals or ludic events. The specific notion of theatre has become increasingly more extensive and overcomes the identification with the dramaturgic work to include fluid, composited, and varied acts, rather than mere dramatic performances.

THIS CHAPTER LOOKS at a Muslim polymath, Ibn Ḥazm (384–556 AH/994–1064 CE), in the period after the abolition of the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba and the formation of many competing polities in the first Taifa period. In spite of his loyalty to the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate, Ibn Ḥazm abandoned Mālikism, the legal school favoured by the Umayyads. Instead, he attached himself to Ẓāhirism, a legal trend based on a literalist approach to the sources of Revelation. I propose in this chapter a new explanation for this move, one that highlights how Ḥāhirism fitted into Ibn Ḥazm's attempt to preserve the court culture in which he had grown up, with its emphasis on reason and diffidence towards charisma.

Ibn Ḥazm: Political Problems, Legal Solutions

In the medieval Islamic West, in the fourth (AH) through the tenth (CE) centuries, Andalusi society was characterized by a strong, long-established state and the support of a powerful network of specialists in religious learning, principally jurists. The collective memory engendered by these specialists provided continuity in religious knowledge (ʽilm) beginning with the arrival of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula in the second through the seventh century up to their own time. This continuity was related to how they managed the knowledge of the Revelation and the prophetic legacy as a means of assuring salvation in the afterlife, for both ruler and the ruled, by leading them along the straight path during this life.1 A different kind of society or societies could be found throughout most of the far western Maghreb (present-day Morocco), where there was no similar network of religious scholars until the Almoravid period and especially during the Almohad period (sixth through the seventh (AH)–twelfth through the thirteenth (CE) centuries) and where it was relatively common to find messianic or saintly figures charged with managing both the sacred sphere and conflicts among tribes. In some cases, these figures were able to provide the initial impetus for the creation of states.

In al-Andalus, however, these charismatic figures rarely succeeded in forming lasting political structures. The reasons for their relative failure are many, among which we may mention the difficulty in recruiting an army in al-Andalus—a task facilitated in North Africa by the tribal context—as well as the existence of a deep anti-charismatic tendency among Andalusi religious scholars.

PAUL ZUMTHOR ARGUED for the absence, at least until the fifteenth century, of autobio graphical writing during the Middle Ages, that is, the absence of a discourse of the “I,” whose reality was seen as part of lived experience. Zumthor cited troubadour song as an example of “a mental world where autobio graphy is out of the question,” a poetry of rhetorical formalization in which the statements that structure the song are not even articulated in a logical sequence of progression or causality, but refer, in a self-contained, disconnected manner, to a virtual model present in the public's memory: the ethical and aesthetic ideal troubadours called fin’amors. The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to a series of twelfth- and thirteenth-century French narrative texts, which, by representing the act of poetic creation on the fictional plane, do in fact link it to the memory of experience gained by a specific subject and to the expression and affirmation of individual identity.

The Identity of the Individual in Romance Literature

Here a brief introductory reflection on individual identity in medieval Romance literature is necessary. In a text dedicated to subjectivity in literature, Charmaine Lee reminded us that medieval literature devotes little space to a construction of individual identity, either in the case of epic poetry, which “cannot, because of its own nature, be a personal genre,” or in that of lyrical poetry, since the troubadour, despite expressing himself in the first person, sings not so much for a lady to whom he expresses his love as for an audience of troubadours (entenedors) capable of appreciating subtle variations in the expression of an amorous rhetorical code they all know and share. Maria Luisa Meneghetti, for her part, related the scant attention given to individual identity to the general anonymity of literature, at least throughout the twelfth century. This is true, particularly if we think of the chanson de geste and the earliest romans antics, narrations in octosyllables inspired by classical epics and still very close to the spirit of the epic matter. The author of a chanson de geste, in adopting the jongleur's mask, appears as the mere transmitter of the events narrated, while the first romanciers hid behind another mask, that of the translator, taking advantage of the authority emanating from the Latin source.

ON 29 DECEMBER 1463, Lope de la Flor, a citizen of Cuenca, appearedbefore the city council. Since royal tax farmers of the alcabalasales-tax for the province of Cuenca had not appeared yet in the city, and, in order to prevent any mismanagement of the alcabala, the city, with the full approval of Pedro de Salcedo, corregidor or Keeper of the City, resorted to an unusual expedient: on its own authority, the city opened up the farming process for each type of alcabala. Accordingly, Lope de la Flor made a bid of twenty-four thousand maravedíes on the alcabala, chargeable on the sale of clothes,and another sixteen thousand maravedíes on the alcabalaon old clothes (both of which bids included rights and taxes). He considered it necessary to justify or frame his conduct thus: “given that his will always was to serve our lord the king, and to take care that their taxes increase and do not decrease.” He was not the only citizen to act this way. The day before, Lope's brother, Ferrand Sánchez de la Flor, presented a written bid of thirtythree thousand maravedíes (also including rights and taxes) on the alcabala on bread, likewise stating he did it “to serve our Lord the King.” Then, on 29 December 1467, Martín López de Huete, also from Cuenca, appeared not before the city council, but the tax farmers’ lieutenants of the alcabalas and tercias of 1468 for the province of Cuenca, Juan de Valladolid and Alonso de Vozmediano, and bid to take on the alcabala on domes-tic animals and lands “to serve our Lord the King, so that his rents be worth more.”

As in other ways power was exercised, taxation is a material and ideological field where different interests, and sometimes even contradictory ones, converge. A field where private aims (i.e., personal gain) merge with public ones, the latter minimizing the negative image implicit in dealing in taxes. It is here where the notion of service (to the king) provides a legitimation. This not only sanctions the legitimacy of the action required, but functions as a legitimating umbrella elsewhere, even if they are against the interests of the king, or the community, all theoretically being served through the thread king—crown—kingdom.

The Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae was created in 1297 by the pope for the Crown of Aragon in the context of the rulership crisis in Sicily. Nevertheless, the king still had to conquer his new domain, and he started this in 1323. Longer and more complex than expected, this was much more than a simple military conquest. This chapter explores how the identity of the island was altered and how institutions played a central role in this change. As a result, Sardinia became an example of how political institutions could reflect and promote a social, and territorial, identity.

Sardinia, Kingdom of the Crown of Aragon

The Mediterranean extension of Catalan–Aragonese power during the Late Middle Ages caused a sequence of events, the importance and effects of which were and are still visible today. The conquest of the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae proved to be a watershed in the process of territorial expansion of the Crown of Aragon, not limited to Sardinia, but fundamental to the ambitious foreign policy of the Iberian confederation. This study outlines the institutional and administrative system established by the Catalan–Aragonese sovereigns in the newly created Regnum Sardiniae, immediately after the occupation of the island in 1323.

It has been widely demonstrated that the system had many elements in common with the other states of the Confederation; many aspects highlight differences and contrasts, thus showing how such a model adapted itself on the island. In the eyes of the Aragonese sovereigns, Sardinia became an experiment for institutions, which over time were either modified or preserved, and, in some cases, even exported to the other confederate kingdoms.

At the time of the Catalan–Aragonese conquest, Sardinia played a highly prestigious role in the Mediterranean region. Its central position in the Mare Nostrum made it a natural bastion, useful to any power looking to extend its overseas rule. Any such crown would gain control of trade in the proximity of the Catalan coastline, along the “Island's route” (Ruta de las Islas), as well as creating a new source of supplies and obtaining much needed inland territory.

The island appeared as a mosaic of diverse territories, both from a political and a juridical point of view. The problematic coexistence of these distinct and fragmented institutional entities fuelled constant disputes, but the new Catalan–Aragonese lords found a way through.

With this statement, inscribed on his huge (1.96 m diameter) mid-fifteenth-century world map, the famous Venetian mapmaker Fra Mauro accepts that he cannot measure the earth based on the experience available to him. Although he acknowledges that a great deal of experience had already been accumulated by practical navigation to both the southern and northern reaches of the globe, all of this has not, in his view, provided enough information to compass its entirety. Consequently, Fra Mauro constructs a quite traditional circular mappa mundi (medieval world map) which is by far the richest we have, and absolutely up-to-date in terms of content. For us, Fra Mauro's creation represents the challenges of mapping the new knowledge available to Latin Europeans around 1500 and, at the same time, their awareness that they did not know enough.

What could people like Fra Mauro actually know about the North, more specifically about the North Atlantic—and what are we, today, not supposed to expect them to have known? In this article, I will pursue the Latin Europeans’ perspective on new geographical information available to them in the decades around 1500. Taking the “global” in “the Global North” literally, I specifically examine contemporary knowledge about the Northern Atlantic between Europe and whatever lay on the other side, as derived from Scandinavian sources and into the older schools of Latin European mapmaking.

This is a big topic and it will become even bigger through the perspective I employ and explain below.

SOCIAL EXCL USION IN late medi eval Spain had many faces: permanent or even occasional economic hardship, which sometimes led to begging and public shame; sickness, especially if it involved a contagious or repugnant illness, such as leprosy or syphilis; immoral or inappropriate sexual habits that clashed with the prevalent social norm, such as concubinage, prostitution, and homosexuality; among women, estrangement and separation from the direct support of the kinship group of origin, which often forced them to resort to prostitution, concubinage, or domestic service; criminal and violent conduct that fractured the social peace; and loss of identity, a situation that often affected pilgrims, foreigners, exiles, and rootless people in general, who frequently turned into outlaws, outcasts, and undesirable elements wherever they went.

The main feature common to all these groups was their position of social, moral, and ideo logical alterity with regard to the rest of society. The main cause for this alterity was, no doubt, the fear they inspired among the rest of the population: fear of losing control over the social norm, of being exposed to bad moral examples and physical danger, of contagion, of crime, and poverty. In his analysis of the European Middle Ages, Bob Moore defined this feeling of fear as the anxiety suffered by the privileged towards those on whom their privilege rests, and its inevitable conclusion is the construction of exclusive categories.

One of the foremost specialists in the study of social exclusion in Spain during the Modern Age wondered some time ago whether it is possible to talk about a culture of the excluded, a culture that developed independently from that of the majority. Or is it more appropriate, as Brosnilaw Geremek does, to talk about a subculture, the construction of a culture “in opposition to” that which we could similarly term a counter-culture or an imitative subculture? For his part, Juan Miguel Mendoza, in his magnificent study of criminality in La Mancha in the Late Middle Ages, claimed that

In the mid-nineteenth century, the great historian Carlo Cattaneo, a Lombard economist and intellectual, wrote that when a village inhabitant of even a few miles from Paris, was asked the name of his homeland, he would have answered with that of his own village. In contrast, when the same question was asked of a peasant or shepherd living in a valley of Bergamo, perhaps tens of miles from the city, they would have answered: “I am from Bergamo.”

This sense of belonging to the cities, even among inhabitants of the countryside, is reflected in the idea that the contado (the territory and population of the countryside around the town) was an integral part of urban identity in northern Italy during the Middle and Early Modern Ages. It also reflects the related idea that the cities around which the large Italian municipalities took shape between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries (just like the old Roman civitates—according to the definition in the Digestum), comprised both the urban territory, delimited by its walls, and the extended territory (in fact, the contado) which belonged to the city and tended to identify itself with the area of the diocese under which it fell.

We need not draw attention to the process that, in the wake of the great urban development across Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, led Central and Northern Italy to build real city-states. This was because the ancient inheritance of the Roman civi-tates was strengthened by the addition of the episcopal see between the second and the third centuries, and by the bonds created and maintained between the bishop and the eminent classes of the diocese. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, urban growth added to these historic centres. To the development of the urban centre and the many municipal institutions created (which were largely at first feudal and episcopal), was also added territorial expansion in line with the territory of the diocese. This expansion, even where incomplete, produced a geo graphy of “city-states,” in which urban territories adjoined other urban territories, leaving little room for rural lordships or forms of political organization not connected to medi eval city communes.

LET ME BEGIN by using this foreword to explain briefly the aims and ideas that inspire the present book, both through a substantial introduction analyzing what we understand by identity in the Middle Ages, and through specific studies that deepen our knowledge of relevant aspects of a topic of great political importance today.

The “power of identity,” to use the title of the second volume of the study of “The Informacion Age” by sociologist Manuel Castells, has been strongly emphasized during the last decades. Different studies have been devoted to analyze the search for identity in our plural societies, the intertwining of various types and levels of identity, the risks around identity conflicts and, in any case, the rise of identity, with its different meanings, in the articulation of current society. Too often history has been used to justify real, recreated, or imagined identities. This is not our aim. Noticing the search for identity in individuals and collectivities throughout history, and looking for new perspectives to reach the core of precedent societies, we adopt identity as an object of analysis, that is, as a challenge to open new ways and tools for historians’ work.

Certainly, this book places identity at the centre of a project to better understand medieval society. By exploring the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so on) we can shed new light on the Middle Ages. A specific legacy of such developments was that by the end of the Middle Ages, a different sense of collective identities, supported by the late medieval socio-economic structure, backed in law and by theological, philosophical, and political thought, defined society. What is more, social structures coalesced across diverse elements, including language, group solidarities, and a set of assumed values.

We understand that identity occupied that central position in defining medieval society with two allied concepts: memory and ideology. The former served to ground identity, while the latter consolidated a coherent common memory and identity. For this reason, this book has two companions devoted to each of these concepts.

WHEN JANET ABU-LUGHOD outlined the contours of a medieval “world system” in 1989, she located most of its “circuits” in the southern hemisphere (see map 1.1). In the decades since the publication of this influential work, changing trends in research, novel approaches to evidence, and collaborative methodologies have complicated, enriched, and expanded this picture, geographically and chronologically. We now know that many more networks linked the regions of Afro-Eurasia, and long before the century of the Mongol conquests (ca. 1250–1350).

It is also becoming clear that any attempt to apprehend the extent and density of these networks—see, for example, map 1.2—will be inadequate and provisional, given the pace and reach of ongoing scholarship. Even this broad hemispheric view is already too limited. For one thing, it does not allow us to follow the ancient movements of colonists from Southeast Asia into the Pacific Ocean and, thereafter, across to the islands of Polynesia—and beyond—in the first millennium of the Common Era. For another, it does not capture the short-lived or seasonal settlements of Norse voyagers on the shores of what is now Newfoundland and (perhaps) other sites along the North American coastline; nor the interactions among peoples of both hemispheres. Instead, only an inadequate, interrupted oval around the arctic indicates the documented and potential interconnectivities of the circumpolar North: the contact zone spotlighted in this special issue of The Medieval Globe.

In these pages, generous scholars from a range of disciplines have joined to explore the boreal globe from the northern Iron Age (especially from the fourth century ce) to the early seventeenth century, offering fresh perspectives that cross the frontiers of regional and national historiographies, as well as conventional periodizations, in order to present new perspectives on migration, trade, material culture, technology, cultural exchange, global imaginaries and epistemologies, and the interactions of humans with their environments.

The first article is a remarkable introduction to all of these phenomena. In “Contesting Marginality: The Boreal Forest of Middle Scandinavia and the Worlds Outside,” Karl-Johan Lindholm and colleagues have combined the results of their ongoing projects to propose a new narrative of historical and technological developments in inland Scandinavia—based entirely on environmental, archaeological, material, and genetic evidence.

URBAN POWER has an ever-changing nature, in which different power-groups, not necessarily organized in a hierarchical way, coexist. Of course, there is a hierarchy in which the king occupies the pinnacle, but in the city of Burgos, especially during the convulsive reigns of Juan II and Enrique IV, circumstances forced kings to come to agreements. Urban patriciate and commoners, the clergy and nobility, and even royal officials were involved in a permanent power struggle against the backdrop of the identity of Burgos, focused on privileges and charters. In late medieval Burgos, only the patricians were predominantly urban. This eminently urban power system is a characteristic of late medieval towns, and the way it was produced, and reproduced itself, can only be explained from an urban viewpoint. This feature helps to explain why towns were able to single themselves out from the other feudal powers. During the Late Middle Ages, Burgos, like most Castilian, Iberian, even European towns and cities, built its political identity on the foundation of three parallel and simultaneous processes: the growth of patrician power, forging certain distinctive features of its own identity, and self-expression (which involved finding an institutional language and ceremonial and related political expressions and attitudes).

From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, a simultaneous, dual process can be detected in the Iberian Kingdoms: on the one hand, an evident tendency towards urban governments becoming dominated by an elite, and, on the other hand, a policy from the monarchy that tried to legitimate and fix oligarchic governments in towns led by their respective urban patriciate. So, Castilian kings helped consolidate internal urban political tendencies: the patrimonialization of public offices, the privatization of power, and the crystallization of an oligarchic self-awareness and self-identity of the urban elites at the expense of the aspirations of the commoners.

In Burgos, this process took place between 1345, when the regimiento, the supreme urban authority, was established by the king, and 15 January 1475, when what we can call a “patrician constitution” was given to the city. Developing this particular power structure was not straightforward, as the duration of the process, one hundred and thirty years, clearly emphasizes. 1345 and 1475 represent two great political successes of the elite of Burgos, the latter a sort of culmination of its aims.

SOLIDARITY AND IDENTITY are relatively new concepts in medi eval history and, although not entirely without precedents, are assuming an increasing role in recent research undertaken in Spain. Their steady advance coincides with the influence of ideas and perspectives introduced from Anthropo logy and Socio logy, such as relational and network analysis, and is perhaps a response to the long-standing historio graphical approaches of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and more remotely derived from the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber. The background to all this is the old confrontation between two different views of historical social relationships: contradiction and conflict, or consensus and solidarity. The importation of tools from other social sciences is not new: it has facilitated excellent results in medi eval history, particularly in the Annales school, with the work of celebrated scholars such as Duby, Le Goff, Schmitt, and Gurevich, all of them inspired by Marc Bloch.

Identity is such a broad and flexible concept that it can be approached in a number of different ways. By nature, it is contextual, and its origins are anthropo logical, but here it is not held up as a key to understanding medi eval society, though it is employed in this way at certain analytical levels.

As for solidarity, again a concept imported from anthropo logy, it has been rela-tively little used by historians, perhaps because of the influence of certain theoretical paradigms. The concept has not, for example, been used—at least among Spanish medi evalists— as a paradigm for explaining society in general in the way that “class” has, however much of a crisis the latter methodo logy may find itself in. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind Peter Burke's analysis (following Thompson) of the concept as a nonabstract social object defined by popular awareness of it. If, for example, during the late medi eval and early modern periods the poor had not yet acquired sufficient class awareness, it was precisely because “vertical solidarity” still outweighed it. In our own ambit, the notion of solidarity—in the sense of reciprocity—has been used to define certain forms within medi eval Christian spirituality, and, above all, certain types of relationship within peasant communities. In summary, solidarity has been regarded principally as a valid concept for referring to horizontal relationships within nonhierarchized or specific social groups.