Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages: Introduction

The present thematic section investigates the movement of people in connection with their work during the Early Middle Ages, and the repercussions of such movement in terms of construction of job identities. The development of specific professional identities and groups of professionals, such as guilds, has been amply studied for later periods in Europe. By contrast, although the picture of an immobile early medieval world has now been overcome, why and how people moved for their job in the early medieval centuries remains a largely underexplored topic. This project aims to take forward the discussion on this theme, and it does so through a reflection on the concept of motility – that is, the entirety of those factors that allow an individual to move through space – and on recent developments in the social sciences. Central questions concern the role of job mobility (considered in individual, relational, and collective terms) in the functioning of economic circuits and of social, cultural and military practices; the role of labour and one’s profession in individual identity construction; and how mobility interacts with the latter. The perspective of the thematic section is an interdisciplinary and global one, with contributions reaching from the North Sea to India and the Southern Tarim Basin and including research on military and ecclesiastical elites, artisans, artists, peasants, merchants and scholars. The contributions are collected in the present volume and in volume 23, to be published in 2025.