Volume 3 (2015)

Networks and Neighbours 3.1 (2015) – Full Text

The movement of people, languages, objects, ideas, institutions, and traditions have long been an essential part of discussions of both late antiquity and the early middle ages. In recent decades the study of ‘(im)migration’ has become central to any discussion of these periods. This historical and historiographical attention has developed in association with other critical, intellectual and academic trends during these years, becoming entangled with concepts, ideas, and empirical data about ‘movement’, ‘space’, ‘land’, ‘centre/periphery’, ‘boundaries’, ‘transmission’, ‘communication’ and ‘ideology’. Within this, the role of present-day politics has never been far away, particularly as Europe has faced, during recent decades and continuing today, regularly shifting boundaries, alternative forms of citizenship, new inner confrontations, and re-emerged forms of emotive reactionism. What place do and should historians have in these debates? How self-reflective have we been about the pasts that we choose to research, and about how we represent them? For example, why the current re-fascination with the ‘Fall of Rome’ or the ‘Pirenne Thesis’, both of which are reaching now beyond the historical field and into mainstream philosophical debate. The texts in this volume either test and reassess the centrality of migration studies to the period in question, or reconsider the migrations of people(s), objects, and ideas alongside migrating epistemologies, such as intellectual, scholarly or educative traditions, rituals, practices, religions and theologies.

Invited Paper

Peter Heather, Migrations, pp. 1-21

Articles

Santiago Barreiro, Genealogy, Labour and Land: The Settlement of the Myramenn in Egils saga, pp. 22-44

Book Reviews

Michael Burrows, review of Florin Curta (ed.), Neglected Barbarians (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 45-47

Roger Collins, review of Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 48-50

Zachary Guiliano, review of Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 51-53

Javier Martínez Jiménez, review of Simon Esmonde Cleary, The Roman West, AD 200-500: An Archaeological Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 54-58

Stanley P. Rosenberg, review of Éric Rebillard, Transformations of Religious Practices in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 59-62

Michael Edward Stewart, review of Meaghan A. McEvoy, Child Emperor Rule in the Late Roman West, AD 367-455 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 63-67

Catalin Taranu, review of Sarah Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 68-70