Northwestern Iberia is renowned amongst medievalists for its wealth of charters. In this episode, I talk to Alvaro Carvajal Castro about how historians are using these documents in concert with archaeology to investigate social and political changes in the 10th and 11th centuries, as kings and elites increasingly intruded upon long-established peasant communities.

Works mentioned in the podcast

Carvajal Castro, Alvaro, 'Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia', International Journal of the Commons, 15(1) (2021), 338–353. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1109

Carvajal Castro, Álvaro and Tejerizo-García, Carlos (eds.), El Estado y la Alta Edad Media (Bilbao, Forthcoming).

Davies, Wendy, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800-1000 (London, 2016)

Escalona, Julio, and Iñaki Martín Viso. "The Life and Death of an Historiographical Folly: The Early Medieval Depopulation And Repopulation of the Duero Basin." In Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085), edited by Simon Barton and Robert Portass, 21-51. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

Quirós Castillo, Juan Antonio. "An Archaeology of “Small Worlds”: Social Inequality in Early Medieval Iberian Rural Communities." Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 12, no. 1 (2020): 3-27.

Music: Karen Gomyo (CC BY-NC 3.0)

Image: Escorial Beatus, B_Escorial_a.jpg (1650×1928) (wikimedia.org)

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