Alice Rio

This impressively researched monograph provides an overview of slavery and its consequences in the early medieval west. Alice Rio is concerned primarily with various states of unfreedom which existed during the period between about 500 and 1100, and with the vexed historiographical question of how the slavery of the classical world and medieval serfdom relate to one another. She rejects any attempt to come up with a singular definition of "slave" in the Early Middle Ages, choosing instead to stress the complexity and variety of the institution across regions and centuries.

This is a dense book which engages heavily with legal texts and economic history sources. As such, I don't think it is likely to be accessible to the non-academic reader, though medievalists—and indeed, anyone working in the field of comparative slavery—will undoubtedly read it with profit. It will undoubtedly be a spur to many new conversations in the field.… (more)