Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe: The Social and Political Order of Peripheral Urban Communities from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Matthew Frank Stevens and Roman Czaja

Abstract

Medieval European history can be understood as a process whereby a European political, social and cultural ‘core’, on an axis from England to Italy, colonised a European ‘periphery’ by creating new towns and settlements.1 In northern Europe this periphery included Wales, Ireland and the shores of the Baltic Sea. This volume contains comparative research produced by an international team of scholars investigating the emergence and development of urban communities within northern European territories subjected to the processes of conquest and colonisation during the high and later Middle Ages. It makes the case that, because of challenges specific to life at the ‘periphery’, the new towns that were founded in these areas developed unique solutions giving rise to equally unique societies that are the historical antecedents of many current or re-emergent civic, regional and national identities in Europe today.