Abstract
This chapter outlines the aims and scope of the volume, providing an overview of stasis in the medieval period and a historiography of stasis in approaches to the medieval. Stasis underpinned the ways that medieval people conceptualized the world and their place within it. As a positive force it connoted stability and regularity and was associated with the divine, but it also bore negative implications, carrying the threat of impasse or stagnation. This chapter argues that considering medieval stasis encourages us to question scholarly approaches to the medieval which privilege narratives of change: those which ultimately reveal as much about our own environment and historical contexts as they do about the Middle Ages.
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Symons, V., Wellesley, M., Bintley, M.D.J. (2017). Introduction. In: Bintley, M., Locker, M., Symons, V., Wellesley, M. (eds) Stasis in the Medieval West?. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56199-2_1
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