| Popis: |
Based principally on the examination of surviving diplomatic material, this thesis argues that lordship determined societal organisation in the eastern Campania between c. 1053 and 1127. This provides the first systematic regional survey of pre-monarchical Norman lordship that builds on recent developments in the wider study of lordship and furnishes the first treatment of the region’s socio-political development in the pre-monarchical Norman era. The re-statement of what lordship was in a society dominated by it, presented here, advances our understanding of the socio-political transformation of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe in two ways. Firstly, it reasserts the usefulness of the paradigm of ‘seigneurial transformation’ for interpreting new constellations of power in early twelfth-century Latin Europe. Secondly, it puts forward a comprehensive view on lordship’s nature, integrating recent historiography on seigneurial violence, mentality and legitimation in eleventh- and early twelfth-century Latin Europe with research on the role of lordship in the social, economic, and religious landscape of the eastern Campania. Drawing attention to a geographically central region and a time-period that saw the solidification of Norman rule in Italy, the thesis presents a systematic overview of lordship in the eastern Campania in four chapters. Chapter I shows that discourses of power within the diplomatic material came to assign lordship a conceptual and thematic centrality in place of Lombard princely rule. Chapter II demonstrates that seigneurial dominance and territorial lordship shaped the structures, spaces, and ways in which the society of the eastern Campania operated. Chapter III analyses of strategies of seigneurial resource accumulation which underwrote and reinforced seigneurial domination, showing the embedded and integral nature of lordship in the society of the region. Chapter IV surveys the relationship of ecclesiastical authority with lordship, demonstrating that that the exercise of territorial lordship was exclusively in lay hands in the eastern Campania, and that prelates nonetheless exercised immense influence through a combination of ecclesiastical and spiritual power and by drawing on vast temporal possessions. "This thesis was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training studentship. I have received further funding from the School of History of the University of St Andrews for learning Italian and from the Royal Historical Society for a research trip."--Acknowledgements |
