Considerações sobre o conceito de campesinato para Alta Idade Média

The word “peasant” is frequently used to address a series of rural realities, very diverse points in time and space. It is a term with long tradition in the Humanities, which goes back at least to the 19th century. However, since the 1980’s there was a dramatic shortage in works focused on this social actors. For the pre-capitalist world in general – and the medieval in particular – we have societies with the absolute majority of the population based in the countryside living from the work in the fields. In spite of that, peasant studies did not find great repercussion in medievalism; aristocracies tend to deserve much more attention from historians than those who cultivate the soil. As result, although the word peasant is not rare in medieval history, it does not come along with a deeper conceptual reflexion. The present text argues that a more precise use of the concept of “peasantry” would bring analytical and historiographical gains to the research of this historically heterogeneous group. With this in mind, a bibliography revision is made in order to propose a theoretical approach the (early) medieval peasantry.