Chris Wickham

Christopher John Wickham (* 1950 ) is an English historian who deals with the history of the Middle Ages .

Wickham studied at Oxford University and received his doctorate in 1975. He taught Medieval History at Birmingham University from 1977 to 2005 . At the end of 2005 he was appointed to the University of Oxford, where he held the chair as Chichele Professor of Medieval History at All Souls College until his retirement in 2016 . He is married to the Byzantinist Leslie Brubaker.

Wickham's main research area is the early medieval social and economic history, especially that of early and high medieval Italy, on which he has published various works. In doing so, Wickham, who sees himself as politically left-wing and can be assigned to the neo-Marxist tendency within British historical studies, not least uses the historical theory of materialism .

In recent years, Wickham has mainly dealt with the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages . In 2005, with Framing the Early Middle Ages , he presented a comprehensive, systematic representation of the Mediterranean world from 400 to 800, in which he primarily assumed a socio-economic approach and used comparative methods. The work was received very positively by experts, especially in the Anglo-Saxon region, and received several awards: in 2005, Wickham received the Wolfson History Prize , in 2006 the German Memorial Prize and in 2007 the American Historical Association received the James Henry Breasted Prize . In 2009, Wickham published The Inheritance of Rome, a subsequent, but more narrative overview presentation that also took up more cultural and political-historical aspects and appeared in the series Penguin History of Europe .

In 2018, his first book, Das Mittelalter, was published in German translation.

Fonts

(only monographs and a selection)

• Economy and society in 8th century northern Tuscany (1975)
• Early medieval Italy. Central power and local society, 400-1000 (1981)
• The mountains and the city. The Tuscan Apennines in the early Middle Ages (1988)
• Land and power. Studies in Italian and European social history, 400–1200 (1994)
• Community and clientele in twelfth-century Tuscany. The origins of the rural commune in the plain of Lucca (1998)
• Courts and conflict in twelfth-century Tuscany (2003)
• Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (2005; review by A. Roach, University of Glasgow )
• Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (2007, as ed.)
• The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009; review by C. Kelly, Cambridge University ( Memento from May 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ))
• The middle age. Europe from 500 to 1500 , Stuttgart 2018, Klett-Cotta, ISBN 978-3-608-96208-6 ( Medieval Europe , 2016).

Web links

• Homepage at Oxford University
• Chris Wickham: What is history? Marxist history writing
• Literature by and about Chris Wickham in the catalog of the German National Library