State in the Early and High Middle Ages

The project Staat im Früh- und Hochmittelalter (State in the Early and High Middle Ages) aims to move the debate about the early and high medieval state away from the one-sided legal-institutional focus of older (especially German) scholarship and introduce new (ethnographic, cultural, textual) perspectives, without losing sight of the different political institutions and their function.

An international project group comprising senior experts was formed to this end and convened annually in order to discuss research on the subject. The members of the research group were encouraged to exchange information from their own fields and to be proactive on an individual or group basis in respect of the overall theme by way of national projects, the allocation of dissertation subjects, the holding of conferences or workshops, their own studies or similar means.       

The aim is to bridge the considerable divide that continues to exist between the national research traditions and interests within Europe. The project is coordinated from the Institute for Medieval Research in Vienna. 

The first results of this collaboration were published in 2006 in a volume of the Institute's Forschungen series: "Staat im Frühmittelalter"(ed. Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl, Helmut Reimitz). An international symposium on the subject was held at Vienna in September 2007, the proceedings of which were published in a second volume: "Der frühmittelalterliche Staat - Europäische Perspektiven" (ed. Walter Pohl/Veronika Wieser)