Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies (Medieval Mediterranean)

This volume presents a selection of papers exploring the ways by which medieval powers sought to legitimize themselves, the political discourses through which this was effected and a wide range of related problems. The six chapters in Part I analyse particular cases in which processes of legitimation can be seen at work, in order to disentangle the wide range of strategies and resources deployed by competing actors in a given context. Part II gathers five articles discussing the specific discourses of legitimation contained in a text or group of related texts, in order to expose their intricacies and their bearing on the way historians look at their sources. The book is of relevance for readers interested in ways of approaching the history of power, and includes contributions by Frances Andrews, Carlos Estepa, Paul Fouracre, Chris Given-Wilson, Piotr Gorecki, Patrick Henriet, Jose Antonio Jara Fuente, Cristina Jular Perez-Alfaro and Stephen D. White.