IMC 2003: Sessions

This session will discuss both contemporary and modern concepts to describe early medieval power and authority. The first paper will focus on the meaning of regnum and similar terms in sources of the period and raise the question whether an awareness of an abstract character of the state existed, or whether the Frankish kingdom was just an aggregate of personal loyalties that helped to maintain some degree of royal authority (the subject of a recent controversy in Germany). The second paper will look at ways to describe how power worked in early medieval society. Theoretical models, from Foucault to Luhmann, may be useful, at least to detect the amount of theoretical assumptions at the basis of the seemingly empirical descriptions found in modern handbooks of early medieval history.