PUNF · Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, 888-1121

Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, 888-1121

The Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, 888-1121 (PUNF) project’s primary aim was to re-frame historical understandings of unfree persons in France during the central Middle Ages by applying methods and frameworks from the growing field of the history of slavery and dependence. Traditionally, legally unfree people in medieval societies have been considered as either ‘slaves’ or ‘serfs’, with the moment of transition from Roman-style slavery to medieval serfdom the object of much scholarly debate. However, in the past decade scholarship has increasingly recognised that unfree status was far more fluid and variable than previously understood. In drawing on the global comparative history of slavery, these new methodologies and approaches can provide more nuanced insights into the lives of unfree people in the Middle Ages and the power relationships which underlay unfreedom as an institution. In order to bridge the divide between the twentieth-century historiography of medieval French society and the emerging methodologies from global slavery studies, the PUNF project sought to conduct a detailed analysis of practices of unfreedom as recorded in the documentary evidence from four ecclesiastical provinces, covering what is now northern France and western Belgium, between the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the twelfth century AD. By forming a picture of unfreedom from first principles, based on evidence of practice, a more nuanced understanding of the role of unfree people in medieval society can be achieved which can transcend the moribund ‘slave-serf’ binary. This new understanding of unfreedom was to be explored through three key themes: 1) The Imposition of Unfreedom: That is to say, the ways in which lords imposed their demands upon the unfree, the extent to which they prioritised social or economic domination, and the implications of these for strategies of élite power. 2) The Agency of the Unfree: That is to say, the reaction of unfree people to the demands of lords, the possibility for negotiation, evasion or resistance to unfreedom, and the scope of action available to unfree people to escape or ameliorate their status. 3) The Historical Record of Unfreedom: That is the places, times and methods by which practices of unfreedom written down, described and preserved, and the extent to which these processes of source creation reveal patterns and lacunae in the historical evidence for unfreedom in the central Middle Ages. By synthesising the findings of these three core themes, the aim of the PUNF project was to define a new framework by which to understand the role of servitude within French society in the post-Carolingian period.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз