Niall Ó Súilleabháin – Medieval Historian

It’s finally here!

At long last, my very first book – Social Elites in medieval France; Status, wealth and power in the Loire valley, c. 850 – 1150 – has been published in their Artes Liberales series by Manchester University Press! Much like the other slightly-less-significant publication news this week, this post isn’t actually going up on the date of publication itself (the book was published on Tuesday), but on the day upon which I received my author copies. You too can get your hands on one of these really beautiful hardbacks (or an equally beautiful E-PUB version) on the MUP website; if you use the code EVENT30 at checkout, you’ll also be able to get a cool 30% off the headline price.

As I alluded to earlier, this book has been the product of a very long journey. It began almost exactly eleven years ago, in September 2025, when I began my PhD in Trinity College Dublin, when I set out to study “The Feudal Revolution in the Middle Loire Valley, c. 850 – c. 1150”. (For those who don’t know, the ‘Feudal Revolution’ is a big debate among medieval historians, particularly historians of France, of the extent to which society fundamentally changed in the decades/centuries around the year AD 1000.) Although at its heart the book does still deal with a lot of the themes of the ‘Feudal Revolution debates – there are plenty of violent lords, bad customs and imposing castles here – I’d like to think that one of the major developments in my thinking over the past decade has been a move beyond those debates. While I do think the book has something to contribute to the ongoing/revived conversations about societal change at the beginning of the second millennium, it also does something more. The book provides an entirely new paradigm to think about elites within medieval societies, and in particular the ways that social elites, both lay and ecclesiastical, justified and reproduced their privileged positions. In that sense, I hope that the readership of this book will go beyond merely specialist in post-Carolingian France, but that students and scholars working on all aspects of medieval lordship, aristocracy and the church will find things to interest them here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about the publication process. While academic monograph publication is a slow process (it’s taken about 12 month from sending the final manuscript through to a copy of the book in my hands), most of blame for that 11-year development lies squarely at might feet. It’s often spoken about that finishing a PhD thesis is a slog, but it takes huge amounts of willpower to pull that text back out of the drawer and re-work it all again into a monograph format. Not only is it a lot of work (although I do think the book is better for it), but it’s mentally tough, when there are lots of competing pressures for your attention like teaching responsibilities and shiny new research projects. The only way I got this book over the finish line was because I was surrounded by a fantastic support network, both professional and personal. Manchester University Press, in particular, were fantastic – very understanding about delays and problems, with lots of advice from both the commissioning editors and the editorial board of Artes Liberales, and a super production team who polished the book into the beautiful artifact that you can now buy!

Because it’s such a big deal that this book is finally out in the world, this will not be the last you hear of it on this site. Starting next week, I’ll be published a weekly blog post exploring each chapter of the book, picking out a particular source or vignette to give you a taster of what’s inside. There will also be more news about talks and events to promote the publication, so watch this space!