Sometime around 1190, King Alfonso VIII of Castile granted a royal charter to the community of Cuenca, a Castilian frontier town recently recaptured from the Muslims and resettled by Christians. The royal charter was in the form of a law code, or fuero. Fueros, which evolved from short lists of exceptions to standing royal directives into much more extensive commentaries on legal matters, were used as an incentive to Christian settlement on the frontier. Reflecting the complexities of administering a town that still had large Muslim and Jewish populations, the fuero or code of Cuenca was...

What intellectual and practical tools did medieval peoples employ in situations of disorder? How did they attempt to maintain cultural stability? Arguing against the common notion of a static medieval society organized along kinship and feudal lines, the contributors to Ordering Medieval Society--among them some of Germany's most influential medieval historians--reveal the diverse egalitarian and hierarchical forms of organization that medieval societies used to forge group structure.

In the book's first section, "Conceiving," the authors examine intellectual modes of ordering...

When Muslim invaders conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they took control of a weakened Greek state in cultural decadence. When, two centuries later, the Normans seized control of the island, they found a Muslim state just entering its cultural prime. Rather than replace the practices and idioms of the vanquished people with their own, the Normans in Sicily adopted and adapted the Greco-Arabic culture that had developed on the island. Yet less than a hundred years later, the cultural and linguistic mix had been reduced, a Romance tradition had come to dominate, and Sicilian poets...

In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares.