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Each region received its specific social organization during the process of occupation in the early and high Middle Ages. This chapter discusses the social distribution of power and property, and shows the long‐term effects of these regional structures. In the infertile regions, small‐scale landowners remained well‐entrenched, but the fertile regions occupied in the Frankish period saw the build‐up of large‐scale properties of the king and religious institutions. These large properties were often organized by way of manors. The chapter analyses the causes of the rise of manorial organization and its decline in the 12th to 14th centuries. The coastal regions only opened up in the high Middle Ages, like coastal Flanders and Holland, did not see the spread of manorialism at all; they were characterized by the freedom of the population and the ample scope for self‐determination. Ordinary peasants and townsmen organized themselves in villages, towns, guilds, commons, and other associations. Their rise was probably helped by the dissolution of central power, and the rise of competing authorities like princes and banal lords.

The French nobility was acculturated to violence that coexisted with courtliness. Feuding is indelibly associated with the Middle Ages, with a culture that is opposed to modernity. But, in fact, evidence for feuding in France before 1559 is fragmentary. Among the aristocracy at least private violence was increasingly under control during the late Middle Ages: revenge killing as a feature of high politics had been eradicated by the beginning of the 16th century. Factors often identified with modernity did much to create the conditions for a recrudescence of vindicatory violence: social mobility, Protestantism, and duelling. Vindicatory violence increased in France because of, not in spite of, the social and economic dynamism associated with the Renaissance, as the traditional elite was challenged by the enterprising and socially mobile.

The chapter shows how increasing population numbers and manorial organization in the early Middle Ages formed the main motors behind the growing importance of grain growing. The variety of food, including meat, dairy, game, fruits, and nuts gathered in the wild, increasingly gave way to the dominance of grain, except for some coastal regions, like Frisia and Flanders, where livestock farming remained important longer. Population pressure, and the rise of lordships and villages, also stimulated the communal organization of farming. These developments pushed up physical output, but mostly had a negative effect on living standards. Production became also more specialized in industries, as these slowly shifted from the individual households to manors and castles, where centralized production developed, linked to the power of lords and religious institutions. From the 12th century, industries shifted to the towns, as in Flanders, connected to further specialization and scale‐enlargement, and promoted by the rise of markets.

This chapter argues that the “Roman conquest” of parts of temperate Europe was not as all-changing as most history books would suggest. The idea of a “Roman Europe,” in the sense of European provinces practicing Roman culture—in particular, Roman ways of seeing—needs considerable revision. Much evidence suggests that Middle Iron Age modes of visual perception and ways of crafting objects continued throughout the period of Roman political domination to reemerge in the so-called “early Germanic” style of the early Middle Ages, as well as in “Celtic” objects such as the Book of Kells and the traditions known as “Anglo-Saxon” and “Viking” art.

This chapter examines the breakdown and redevelopment of the civilization machine during the Middle Bronze Age alongside a fearsome new assemblage that is best described as a “war machine.” The operation of the war machine entailed not only the reproduction of political violence but also the dissection of social orders, severing a sovereign body from the bodies of subjects—those who command from those who obey. Through the conspicuous consumption of Middle Bonze Age mortuary ritual, the war machine reproduced the terms on which social order was predicated—charisma, violence, and distinction. However, built into the conjoined operations of the civilization and war machines was a contradiction. As the one (the erstwhile sovereign) pulled away from the many (the constituted public), demands upon material resources exceeded capacities. Territorial fragmentation and military stalemate—consequences of the war machine's proliferation—threatened to undermine the workings of the civilization machine, dissecting a previously expansive public into smaller and smaller segments. As a result, the central principle of charismatic authority was put at risk insofar as political power flowed from the provision of needs through conflicts successfully waged.

This chapter discusses the changing Western perceptions of Islam from the Middle Ages to the present. Topics covered include images of Islam, Christian-Islamic contact in history, accounts of Islam that emerged, later Catholic views of Islam, the Protestant view, positive strains of interpretation of Islam, and depictions of Islam in Western literary works of the Middle Ages.

Analyses the development of a new mode of state in the Middle Ages in Europe. This was the emergence of an interactive state, signified by a regulated intercourse between state and society. This was a state built on pluralism, power sharing and constitutionalism. Certain institutional and societal conditions contributed to this development, which laid the ground for the so‐called ‘European miracle’.

This chapter explores Apuleian influence in the Middle Ages. The importance of Monte Cassino in preserving (and providing early responses to) Apuleius' works is discussed. Evidence is presented that the most educated minds of the period could (re-)create Apuleian effects through their imitation of narrative and descriptive sources (such as the De nuptiis), which were themselves suffused with Apuleian themes and diction.

Gives perspective to the debate over living standards during industrialization by examining health and nutrition over the past 1200 years using stature either recorded on military records or inferred from skeletal remains. From an average of 173.4 cm in the early Middle Ages, the heights of men fell approximately 6.4 cm, reaching a minimum sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and recovery to levels of a millennium earlier was not attained until the 1920s. The decline that began in the late Middle Ages may be linked with a cooler and more variable climate; growing inequality; urbanization; fluctuations in population size that impinged on nutritional status; the global spread of diseases associated with European expansion and colonization; and wars over state building or religion. The upturn well underway by the nineteenth century was associated initially with dietary improvements and later with reduced exposure to disease related to public health measures and better housing.

This chapter explores changes in sacramental penance. It is shown that the form of confession prevalent today is a product of the High Middle Ages and the religious reforms of the Council of Trent. Modern devotion to the sacrament signaled by frequent reception is a relatively recent phenomenon that has varied greatly since the Council of Trent.

This concluding chapter provides some final insights into the history surrounding the Problem of Paganism. First, the chapter considers how the progress of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe would likewise lead to a natural progression of attitudes from medieval severity to Early Modern toleration. The reality, as the chapter shows, defies such expectations, and this unchangingness is remarkable, because according to almost every historical account, the three centuries involved were a time of epochal change, of the transition to what is called ‘modernity’, and the most emblematic event of the new era, Columbus's voyages, had a direct bearing on the Problem of Paganism. After expounding on this point, the chapter suggests a new way of approaching philosophy from the Long Middle Ages — ‘Historical Synthesis’.