Abstract
Project E02 studies how elites in late antiquity and the early middle ages managed the threat (sometimes latent, more often real enough) to their socio-economic power base posed by a paucity of agrarian labor. Central to this project is the traditionally accessible instrument of re-ordering, i.e. recourse to regulations designed to inhibit the social and spatial mobility of agrarian labor. The project will undertake a comparative study of three phases in which this phenomenon underwent significant aggravation, to the point of generating a threat discourse along with attendant practices of re-ordering in the form of new legal institutes, administrative measures, and administrative correspondence.
