Inequalities in Pre-modern Europe

Inequality was the prevailing ethical norm in all European societies until the age of revolutions. Socio-legal hierarchies were supposed to mirror natural inequalities between peoples and individuals. However, there was no single criterion for determining the justice of these socio-legal hierarchies, nor were they immutable or uncontested. This graduate seminar has two objectives: to map the diverse dimensions of inequality that structured pre-modern European societies and to introduce students to influential trends in the literature on these topics and how they have changed in the course of the past fifty years or so.