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Living at the Margins: African Peasants in an Age of Extremes, 300-900 CE

4th IMAFO Alumni Lecture by Paolo Tedesco

Tuesday 29.09.2026 04:09 pm
Woodcut on enamel depicting agricultural work, ca. 1160. (DEA / G. Dagli Orti / De Agostini via Getty Images) © GettyImages

In Living at the Margins Paolo Tedesco looks at the history of African peasants from the fourth to the ninth century: their economic and social history and – as far as possible – the shaping of their economic mentality. The lecture offers a concrete view of how peasant households organized their labor and secured their reproduction from one generation to the next. Starting from key extant sources – the most important being the Tablets Albertini – this lecture explores the microhistory of a marginal, and, as such, exemplary rural community: the people from the fundus Tuletianos in southern Numidia. The result is a deep dive into the internal dynamics of the Tuletianos’s community, its households, and its members. The Tuletiani were exemplary, not exceptional. The life there reflects the organization of the standard rural community of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

 

Information

 

29.09.2026

16:00 Uhr


Venue:

Kleiner Kassensaal
PSK, Hochparterre
Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna


Organisation and Contact:

Maximilian Diesenberger
Helmut Reimitz