• Walter POHL – Nina MIRNIG (Eds.) – Annamaria PAZIENZA – Irene BAVUSO (Guest Eds.)

medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025

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A truly sensational find is presented in volume 23 of Medieval Worlds: a newly discovered Christian world chronicle in Arabic, which Adrian C. Pirtea examines in a preliminary case study. We furthermore open a new series on Multilingualism in Premodern Societies, which investigates patterns of communication, mobility and power in connection with language use in a Eurasian context. This first instalment focuses on Urban Administrative Spaces (guest editor: Katalin Szende), in which two captivating articles make use of pragmatic literacy and investigate chancery documents of the 14th-17th centuries: Lena Sadovski uses them to draw out skilfully the multilingual environment of Venetian Dalmatia. Marijana Mišević highlights in her study the potential of this hitherto underused source for studying the communication between Ragusans and Ottomans. Our cluster on Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages (guest editors: Annamaria Pazienza and Irene Bavuso) is continued from volume 20 (2024) with three contributions investigating how mobility could have meaningful impact on social advancement and identity formation: Joe Glynias presents a new view on the renowned 11th-century Baghdadi physician Ibn Buṭlān and his career as Christian Arabic author. The movement of peasants in 10th-century Spain as reconstructed from charters serves for Robert Portass as model to develop ideas on the mobility of local communities. Irene Bavuso combines theories of mobility and sedentism to offer new perspectives on artisans in early medieval England. A rare source on papermaking in 13th-century Baghdad was transcribed and partially translated by Shiva Mihan for a further addition to our volume on Mongols’ Baghdad. Knowledge Transmission through Manuscript Cultures before and after the Conquest (guest editors: Bruno de Nicola and Nadine Löhr).

medieval worlds is open to submissions of broadly comparative studies and matters of global interest, whether in single articles, companion papers, smaller clusters, or special issues on a subject of global/comparative history. We particularly invite studies of wide-ranging connectivity or comparison between different world regions.

Apart from research articles, medieval worlds publishes ongoing debates and project and conference reports on comparative medieval research.

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medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025

ISSN 2412-3196
Online Edition

ISBN 978-3-7001-5131-9
Online Edition



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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2,
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400
https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: bestellung.verlag@oeaw.ac.at
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Work and Mobility in their Local Dimensions in Early Medieval Iberia

    Robert Portass

medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025, pp. 97-114, 2025/11/27

doi: 10.1553/medievalworlds_no23_2025s97


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doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no23_2025s97

Abstract

This article begins and ends by arguing that social historians of the early Middle Ages interested in the relatively neglected themes of work and mobility would do well to refocus their energies on the »small worlds« unearthed by charter-based reconstructions of local societies – the latter a methodology associated above all with the pioneering studies of Wendy Davies since the 1980s. It argues that this approach – that is, what we might call a »reversion to the local« – remains relevant because most people’s social experience – indeed, their entire referential system – took root and developed within a limited geographical compass, so if we want to understand the structures that gave shape and meaning to non-elite life, it is imperative that we consider work and mobility – the principal themes of this article – in the specific local contexts in which they operated. Such an approach is of course constrained by the patchy survival of evidence from across early medieval Europe. But the mundane affairs of the village society of tenth-century north-western Spain can be tracked in some detail, especially in certain unusually well-documented villages, such as Rabal, analysed herein, thanks to significant numbers of surviving charters, allowing us to see something of the potential richness of »the local« as a frame of analysis. This article proposes that by focusing on the small-scale and the quotidian, we address the lives of rural cultivators, as far as possible, on their own terms, enabling us, to the degree that it is indeed possible, to set those lives within carefully historicised contextual horizons.

Keywords: work, mobility, local society, the peasantry, communal management of resources