Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 offers a substantially new interpretation of what happened to slavery in Western Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The periods at either end of the early middle ages are associated with iconic forms of unfreedom: Roman slavery at one end; at the other, the serfdom of the twelfth century and beyond, together with, in Southern Europe, a revitalised urban chattel slavery dealing chiefly in non-Christians. How and why this major change took place in the intervening period has been a long-standing puzzle. This study picks up the various threads linking this transformation across the centuries, and situates them within the full context of what slavery and unfreedom were being used for in the early middle ages. This volume adopts a broad comparative perspective, covering different regions of Western Europe over six centuries, to try to answer the following questions: who might become enslaved and why? What did this mean for them, and for their lords? What made people opt for certain ways of exploiting unfree labour over others in different times and places, and is it possible, underneath all this diversity, to identify some coherent trajectories of historical change?

About the Author
Alice Rio was Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, and Osborn Fellow and College Lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before joining the History department at King's College London in 2009. She is the author of Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages (2009), which won the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize in 2010, as well as of a number of articles on law, legal practice, and unfreedom in the early middle ages.

Reviews
This excellent work provides a new lens for understanding the many varieties of early medieval unfreedom, and readers should welcome the clarity Rio has brought to this topic... Highly recommended. * CHOICE *
Rio spends considerable ink offering critiques of key scholarship on medieval slavery. I used this book in a reading group I facilitated for graduate student women, and these extended analyses were extremely useful in thinking through the scholarly landscape on medieval slavery and, for a wider audience, modes of scholarly criticism ... [This book] is a good reminder, useful to scholars and students alike: law is not static, not in its formation or its implementation, and instead of reading law as something that shapes human behavior, we must recognize the ways in which human behavior shapes law's creation and utilization. * Rena Lauer, H-Slavery *
Slavery after Rome shows in great detail and with commendable sophistication the omnipresence of that institution, in its many faces, in the early Middle Ages in the west. Rio has produced a rich and courageous book that tackles in new and original ways an important historical topic, bringing to the table an impressive array of evidence and arguments concerned with the early medieval period. * Ulrike Roth, Early Medieval Europe *
Rio has done a splendid job of analysing an extremely intractable source base and providing an interpretation that, without in any way trying to smooth over the inconsistencies and messiness of the evidence, nevertheless makes sense. Her book forces us to rethink narratives regarding the importance of the slave trade for the early European economy ... She has done a tremendous service by giving us a new basis for discussion of one of those elements of social transformation. This study will be an indispensable addition to any and every library (and course bibliography) that includes early medieval history in its remit. * Shami Ghosh, Reviews in History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198704058
Author Alice Rio
Format Hardback
Page Count 298
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 161mm * 23mm