Patrick Lantschner studied at Oxford and Pisa, and is from the South Tyrol, a multilingual region in Northern Italy. He has published on cities in Europe and the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, and is broadly interested in societies in which the state is but one of a number of players. He takes a keen interest in comparative and transnational history, and has worked with scholars from anthropology, law, and oriental studies.

Winner of the 2016 Bronislaw Geremek Prize for an outstanding first book

"[I]mpressive..."--Speculum

"In this brilliant book, Patrick Lantschner offers new insight into urban revolts in the later Middle Ages...Lantschner's argument is convincing, not least because of the richness of his book...We can therefore only hope that Lantschner's analysis will provoke other historians to study the 'earlier' political development of cities in particular and urban history in general from a similar comparative perspective."--Urban History

"[T]his is an excellent monograph and is very well written, providing a detailed overview of complex ideas and situations and in doing so adding an important civic dimension to political studies of state formation...[A]n impressive book bringing in a range of examples and offering an interesting mix of well-studied cases and less well-known ones...Lantschner has managed to fit an impressive amount into a short and easy to read survey of six complex situations, and has used them to offer a new political account of the later Middle Ages."--Reviews in History

"Lantschner offers his readers a careful, thorough, and insightful analysis...[A] deeply compelling model of urban conflict, which offers historians a powerful set of tools for understanding political life in medieval cities."--American Historical Review

"[R]emarkable detail based on deep archival research"--English Historical Review