Between the years 1050 and 1300 the European landscape turned to stone. It was a structural transformation that led to the birth of a new, long-lasting panorama and helped in the creation of individual, collective and regional identities: a landscape epitomising the way we see the space and territory of Europe. The ERC-Advanced Grant Petrifying Wealth seeks to rewrite the social history of the central Middle Ages, emphasizing the need to reassess from an untried perspective an element that has always been present in our vision of the period—the sudden ubiquity of masonry construction—but which has hardly been given the opportunity to provide in-depth explanations for complex social dynamics. A project that seeks to offer novel explanations to previously unasked questions about wealth, building, and collective identity.

Petrifying Wealth. The Southern European Shift to Masonry as Collective Investment in Identity, c.1050-1300 is an European Research Council Avanced Grant (GA Nº 695515)

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