The Experience of Local Officialdom in Europe and the Mediterranean, c.1000–1500: Between Order and Disorder, panel at the 2024 International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 1–4, 2024

Local officeholders and petty officials were integral components of medieval political life across Europe and the Mediterranean, central to the configuration and experience of power but whose presence and absence could also signify crisis and confusion. Modern scholarship and medieval sources alike have acknowledged that local officers could just as easily be sources of disorder as order, generators of crisis as well as crisis managers. This strand builds on such insights to consider local officers in relation to order and disorder within their immediate local and broader sociopolitical contexts. Our approach is broad, encompassing a variety of officers—civic, royal, ecclesiastical, seigneurial, etc.—as well as challenges to the notion of ‘officialdom’. It proposes a social and experiential history which highlights the roles, profiles, and possibilities of a range of officers in their individual as well as institutional and social contexts, by considering how they supported or challenged models of political and social order prevalent in their communities or promulgated by their superiors.

Proposals might like to consider but are not limited to:

• Questions of justice, jurisdiction, authority
• Formulations and conceptions of office and officialdom, both theoretical and practical
• Prosopographical and biographical studies of local officers
• Accountability, both financial and in the sense of holding officers to account
• Relations between officers and local communities, including reactions, resistance and dissent
• Officers in explicit crisis situations (political, economic, social)
• Notions of corruption, morality and the ethics of officeholding
• Officers as mediators or brokers between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’

Organizers
Charlie Steinman, Columbia University
Nathan Meades, University of St. Andrews