State in the early and High Middle Ages

The volume results from the discussions of an international project group on the medieval state aimed at moving beyond national research traditions with their limitations. Rather than dealing with the terminological problem whether the term `state` should be used for early medieval kingdoms at all, it raises the question how political integration was reached and how the monarchy and the aristocracy, Christian and lay institutions, the kingdom and the people interacted in shaping supra-regional communities. The contributions offer case studies discussing both perceptions of the state and the ways how `public` power worked. Debates about the medieval state often departed from modern concepts of the state, which in turn was often judged inadequate to describe early medieval realities. Among German medievalists, a strong scepticism has prevailed since the 1930s. The cohesion of medieval kingdoms was, according to this approach, based on power relations between persons, rather than on the state and its institutions. Whereas the older school saw the mechanisms of integration in the bonds between lord and retainer, bound by a moral of allegiance, recent research has concentrated on rituals and symbolic communication as a means of maintaining some form of public power where direct control was impossible. This has led to a rather archaic view of early- and high-medieval `power without a state`. The articles in this volume, while taking this line of research into account, offer a more complex image of the early medieval state, considering various forms of political integration and of abstract perceptions of the wider community. The contributions deal with contemporary ideas about the regnum in the context of the exercise of power (Matthias Becher, Hans-Werner Goetz, Stefanie Dick and Ian Wood), with the Carolingian court as a focus of aristocratic careers (Stuart Airlie), with the role of the gentes as a factor of political integration (Walter Pohl) and with the ecclesia as a frame of the political community, represented by the bishops (Mayke de Jong, Steffen Patzold). In this way, the debate can move beyond misleading alternatives (institution or personal networks, regnum or ecclesia, state or `power without state`) and focus on the ways in which state integration could work in the early middle ages.