EAA2021: Abstract

The castle seems usually to indicate a building located in the rural landscape and dated back to the medieval ages. Indeed, the word castrum summarizes a multiplicity of meanings from the Roman period until today: a military encampment, a fortification located to control the borders the territory around (by sea and by land), a fortified village where peasants live inside, an aristocratic residence, up to the Bavarian medieval fake residence of Ludwig II, which is called castle but is not a castle.
Why Latin sources used just one or two words (castrum or castellum) to define several (and different) settlement realities? This represents a real problem, a semantic trouble in which the researchers have to take into account in their studies.
The purpose of this paper is to concentrate the attention on the different typologies of castles born in the European context, especially in Italy, where the phenomenon of castra can be generally described as a concentration of the rural population inside fortified high-altitude fenced sites, starting between X-XI century AD; but also in this context not all that castles are the same for the different chronology, function, and history.

Castles, Rural landscape, Semantic problem, Medieval architecture, Mediterranean landscape, European castles

 Abstract (PDF)

Martina Bernardi¹