Oviedo, in the Middle Ages. The City and its Countryside, 14th-16th Centuries

Abstract

This study addresses city-countryside relations in the Middle Ages from the point of view of the urban landscape. Rural society and urban society, analysed from the perspective of spaces, presenting the historian with two directly connected realities that are in no way opposed to each other. The countryside’s entry into the city and the territorial impact of the urban centre on the surrounding area highlights the problems of urban societies from a global and integrating perspective, as well as the city-countryside dialectic. It also allows us to project the organisational models of Medieval societies into the present, giving historians the key interpretative tools they need to understand societies in those centuries.