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

This introduction presents the second part of a themed issue on Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages, whose first part appeared in volume 20 (2024). It discusses the advantages of considering the concept of motility to investigate the combination of movement and occupation, and its reflection on identity construction. Some of the issues that the contributions to both parts have addressed include how mobility could have important consequences on social advancement and the shaping of identities; the kinds of networks that helped the movement of individuals and were created by them; the importance of micro-mobilities and the local horizon of the medieval communities. The introduction also summarises the contents of the three new contributions. Irene Bavuso investigates the mobility of smiths in early post-Roman England; Robert Portass focuses on local mobilities in rural societies of tenth-century northern Spain; Joe Glynias concentrates on the highly mobile career and multiple identities of the eleventh-century intellectual Ibn Buṭlān. The introduction concludes with some reflections on how to approach female work and mobility – a theme that has been traditionally less visible in early medieval scholarship, and for which one may profit from theoretical refinements and well as from a cross-disciplinary broadening of the pool of investigated sources.