Social Elites in Medieval France

This book makes an important and compelling intervention in long-standing debates about social changes, the power of the aristocracy and the "Feudal Revolution" in the European central middles ages. At its core, the book asks how the �lites of Europe - the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as the lay aristocrats - 'got away with' the extreme accumulations of wealth and power which characterised medieval society. The research adopts an innovative methodology, seeing social status not as a static position within society, but as processual, contested and in constant need of affirmation. Drawing on a case study from the Loire valley region in central France, the work argues that �lite domination was neither natural nor static but was radically transformed as part of a broader re-shaping of the French economy and society in the centuries surrounding the year AD 1000.