Book excerpt: How did medieval people define themselves? And how did they balance their identities as individuals with the demands of their communities? Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages intertwines the study of identities with current scholarship to reveal their multi-layered, sometimes contradictory dimensions. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from legal texts to hagiographies and biblical exegesis, and diverse cultural and social approaches, this volume enriches our understanding of medieval people's identities - as defined by themselves and by others, as individuals and as members of groups and communities. It adopts a complex and wide-ranging understanding of what constituted 'identities' beyond family and regional or national belonging, such as social status, gender, age, literacy levels, and displacement. New figures and new concepts of 'identities' thus emerge from the dialogue between the chapters, through an approach based on life-histories, lived experience, ethnogenesis, theories of diaspora, cultural memory and generational change.