About «The Donkey and the Boat» by Chris Wickham

Published in April 2023 by Oxford University Press, Chris Wickham's «The Donkey and the Boat» examines the characteristics and the development of Mediterranean economies during the central Middle Ages, from c. 950 to c. 1180. It is now also available in Italian, as «L’asino e il battello» (Viella, 2024). It covers six regions of the Mediterranean, Egypt, Ifriqiya (Tunisia), Sicily, Byzantium, al-Andalus and north-central Italy, and is based on the extensive study of both the written evidence and the archaeological record – which needs stressing, as the latter has been hardly employed in the debates on the so-called medieval «commercial revolution» up until now. Indeed, the book has revived the interest in a topic which has been largely neglected in recent decades, and which had never been examined in a far-reaching, Mediterranean-wide comparative perspective.