This volume examines interdisciplinary boundaries and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis, and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, treated not as mere barriers but also as places of exchange in the early Middle Ages.
Focusing on borderlands, Continuation or Change uncovers the changing political and military organisations at the time and the significance of the functioning of former borderland areas. The chapters answer how the fiscal and military apparatus were organised, identify the turning points in the division of dynastic power, and assign meaning to the assimilation of certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition. Finally, the authors offer answers to what exactly a "statehood without a state" was in regard to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands.
Continuation or Change is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in medieval warfare, Eastern European history, medieval border regions, and cross-cultural interaction.
About the Author: Gregory Leighton is NAWA Ulam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Archival Sciences, Nicholas Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Dr. Leighton studies the Teutonic Order and the Baltic crusades (13th-15th centuries). He has published in The Journal of Medieval History, Zapiski Historyczne, and other leading periodicals. His first monograph will appear with ARC Humanities Press in 2022.
Lukasz Różycki is Professor of History at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. His main research interests include the study of Roman and Byzantine theory of warfare, with a particular focus on military treatises, and the study of the 6th century. He is the author of a number of books - most recently Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity (2021) - and articles related to the study of late antiquity and the history of the Byzantine Empire.
Piotr Pranke is an assistant professor who deals with the history of medieval Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe, and is a member of the Faculty of Historical Sciences at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. His scientific interests include the history of trade in the Viking era and the history of the Otton Empire and its influence on the shaping of the areas of "younger Europe". His most recent book publication is Medieval Trade in Central Europe, Scandinavia, and the Balkans (2020).
