Publisher's Synopsis
Their themes -- spanning the religious, political, economic and juridical -- are just as varied. What could they have in common?Principally, a collective approach, the approach of a research group focusing their lens on social history, beyond the differences of "specialties" and the periodizing of time that historians often favor. Bringing together documentation as close aspossible to the individual with an attention to the structures that these individuals actualize: this is the primary concern of the RHiSoP group of the CRH. We at the RHiSop practice a situated history of society making that can enounce or leave unspoken, affirm or dispute, hierarchies, categories and boundaries - the structures that we try to glimpse at the heart of this interplay of actors. We do not, however, restrict ourselves to what the actors themselves have to say about it. One of thesocial modalities of these conflicts of classification is their translation into space (the space of borders, for instance, but also the infinitesimal space of precedence, greed, or inspections). This is the reason our volume pairs the study of borders andboundaries, thus the study of thresholds and gradients. These are valuations by which spatial distinction is always a social construction as well. As a result, nothing is static, and the RHiSoP group focuses on tracking historical evolution, these moments where society-making allows room, in general conflictually, for the possibility of the reordering of structures.
