Medieval Studies Book Club – Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

Welcome back! The first meeting of the Medieval Book Club will take place on Thursday, September 29, 2025, at 6 pm at Scheide Caldwell House 209.

We will be discussing Jamie Kreiner’s Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (2020), which has won multiple prizes in medieval history and environmental history (see additional information below).

Dinner will be provided. If you would like to join, please RSVP here by September 20, 2025.

Students of all years and departments are welcome! Historians, engineers, philosophers, artists – the Middle Ages have something for everyone.

This meeting is for Princeton University students only.

Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (2020)

From the publisher’s website:

From North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture in the early medieval period. Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far‑reaching consequences.

Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed: by the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself.

From reviews:

“One of the most original books I’ve read in a long time.” — Julia Smith, Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford

“Jamie Kreiner’s book has a stunning range, from Iceland to the Islamic lands, showing how we cannot understand the medieval world at all unless we understand pigs. This was one of the most insightful and satisfying reads I have had for ages.” — Chris Wickham, author of last year’s Medieval Book Club book The Donkey and the Boat