to copywriter: Always list contributors
This first study of the nature of frontiers and frontier societies in the Middle Ages focuses on those between England and Scotland, Wales and Ireland, Castile and Granada, and on the Elbe. It examines the consequences for frontier societies of being located in areas of cross-cultural contact, and often confrontation. Institutions, expectations and even local family structures are shown to have been products of an environment of long-term and ubiquitous fighting. But, devices also developed in frontier societies for mediation, arbitration, and negotiation. Interaction between different religions, laws, languages, and mores, was often hostile, but could sometimes be flexible - responses which are reflected, for example, in the literature and poetry of the areas involved. This comparative study, by expert contributors, throws new and important light on our thinking about frontiers, and fills a major gap in the history of medieval Europe.

Contributors: Geoffrey Barrow, Robert Bartlett, Robert I. Burns, José Enrique López de Coca Castañer, Rees Davies, Robin Frame, Anthony Goodman, Manuel Conzález Jiménez, Paul Knoll, Friedrich Lotter, Angus MacKay, Katherine Simms, Alfred Thomas.