Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe: The Social and Political Order of Peripheral Urban Communities from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries [Hardcover]

Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europeoffers comparative research on the emergence and development of medieval chartered towns within northern European territories subjected to conquest and colonisation, namely Ireland, Wales, Prussia, and Livonia.
In the later Middle Ages a European 'core' of culturally and administratively sophisticated societies with rapidly growing populations, on an axis from England to Italy, colonised the European 'periphery'. In northern Europe this periphery included Wales and Ireland, as colonised by the English, and Prussia and Livonia, as colonised (mainly) by Germanic and Nordic peoples. A key tool of colonisation was the chartered town, giving citizens distinguishing legal privileges and a degree of self-regulation.Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europecontends that while the chartered town, as a legal and social-political concept, was transferred to peripheral areas by colonisers, its implementation and adaptation in peripheral areas resulted in unique societies, not simply the replication of core urban forms and communities. In so doing, it compares the development of social and political institutions in the chartered towns of medieval Ireland, Wales, Prussia, and Livonia. Research themes include community formation, normalisation/social disciplining, and peace making/keeping. It is the nature of rich books to raise questions. In this case, this regret does not carry much weight in view of the importance of the heuristic and methodological avenues opened up by this work. -- Tobias Boestad,Le Moyen ?ge

Matthew Frank Stevens,Associate Professor of History, Swansea University,Roman Czaja,Professor of History, Nicolaus Copernicus University

Matthew Frank Stevensstudied at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, completing his PhD in medieval social and economic history in 2005. He is now an Associate Professor of history at Swansea lÓ(