The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages

This pioneering volume illuminates the practice of giving, endowing and exchanging gifts in the early Middle Ages, from Anglo-Saxon England to the Islamic world. Focusing especially on the language associated with medieval gift giving, this important new work examines how people visualized and thought about gift giving and, importantly, how they distinguished between the giving of gifts and other social, economic, political and religious exchanges. The authors demonstrate that gift giving was already complex, distinctive and sometimes contentious before the twelfth century and operated within a broad international context. They draw from the sources a deeper understanding of the early Middle Ages by looking at real cases and real people: peasants, the elderly and women, as well as elites. The culture of medieval gift has often been treated as archaic and exotic; this book, by contrast, reveals people going about their lives as individuals in down-to-earth and sometimes familiar ways.

Wendy Davies is Professor of History Emerita at University College London, and an associate member of the History Faculty, University of Oxford. She has wide interests in early medieval social and economic history and her books include Wales in the Early Middle Ages (1982), Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (1988) and Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (2007). Paul Fouracre is Professor of Medieval History and currently Head of History at the University of Manchester. With interests in the political and social history of the Franks, his publications include Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography 640-720 (with R. Gerberding, 1996), The Age of Charles Martel (2000) and, as editor, The New Cambridge Medieval History, volume I (Cambridge, 2005).