Officer and the People
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This volume focuses on the relationship between officers and local communities in premodern Europe. Its starting point is that communities played a central role in holding officers to account and thereby contributed fundamentally to shaping premodern rule and authority. The volume's main aims are to further our understanding of popular political participation in premodern practices of officers' accountability, and to shift the emphasis in the study of premodern bureaucracy to the agency of the people. The essays in the volume address different mechanisms of accountability in various geographical and chronological contexts, bridging the traditional gap between medieval and early modern studies. Yet none offers a traditional study of officers using institutional and prosopographical approaches. Instead they all shift the focus to the people in their various communities and their interactions with representatives of central authority. Taking a bottom-up perspective, the essays thus highlight the role of the people as key actors who exerted tangible and visible control over the officers' behaviour, their self-image, and individual scope for action. Ultimately, therefore, the volume contributes to the debate about state-formation from below.
María Ángeles Martín Romera is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the Complutense University of Madrid. She works on the social history and political culture of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period in Mediterranean Europe. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at University College London. She has published on late medieval oligarchies, patronage, kinship, women's agency, social networks, and corruption from the late medieval to the early modern period.
Hannes Ziegler is Principal Investigator in a research project on 'Common Informing' at LMU Munich. From 2016 to 2021 he was a Research Fellow in Early Modern History at the German Historical Institute London. He has worked on the history of the British Customs in the eighteenth century and has also published on the history of the Holy Roman Empire.