This collection of essays from both established and emerging scholars analyses the dynamic connections between conflict and violence in medieval Italy. The contributors present a new critique of power that sustained both kingship and locally based elite networks throughout the Italian peninsula. A broad temporal range, covering the sixth to the twelfth centuries, allows this book to cross a number of 'traditional' fault-lines in Italian historiography – 774, 888, 962 and 1025. The essays provide wide-ranging analyses of the role of conflict in the period, the operation of power and the development of communal consciousness and collective action by individuals and groups. It is thus essential reading for scholars, students and general readers who wish to understand the situation in medieval Italy.

This book provides a new analysis of the Lombards in Italy from their first arrival in the peninsula towards the end of the sixth century until the end of their contribution to Italian politics in the eleventh century.

Focusing on the environmental and human parameters of the Lombard contribution to Italy in the Early Middle Ages, Heath provides a new and up-to-date analysis. Rather than considering traditional political developments alone, the book weaves together discussion of the spatial aspects of Lombard settlement; their impact on urban and rural landscapes; their responses to religious praxis and belief, and through this, the creation of a revived identity in a new context, which was embodied in law—one of their most enduring legacies. The book restores the Lombards to a position of central importance in early medieval Italy.

Written as the Lombard kingdom was on the cusp of downfall at the hands of the Carolingian empire, the works of Paul the Deacon (c. 720-799) are vital to understanding the history of Italy and Western Europe in the Middle Ages. But until now, scholars have tended to neglect the narrative structure of his texts, which reflect in important ways his personal responses to the events of his time. This study presents fresh interpretations of Paul's Historia Romana, Vita Sancti Gregorii Magni, Gesta Episcopum Mettensium, and Historia Langobardorum by focusing on him as an individual and on his strategies of argumentation, ultimately advancing a new conception of Paul as a dynamic author whose development of multiple lines of thought deserves closer examination.