HISTORICAL WRITING OVER the last few decades has been defined in large measure by an endeavour to understand the past of social realities that are so familiar today that one tends to ignore the history behind them. Historians have traced the origins of Western colonialism to the crusades or uncovered the medieval roots of human rights, seeking to historicise their subject and understand how the familiar features of modern life began to take shape and functioned according to the logic of earlier historical contexts. For all that cities are indelibly associated with modern civilisation, the history of urbanism stretches back to Mesopotamia at the end of the Neolithic. Conversely, we take the landscape for granted – it has been there since time immemorial, it seems; but research has shown that centuries of human activity created the open fields and alpine pastures. And so on: everything has a history.

What then of such a defining aspect of the Western modern world as the autonomous moral agent – how has it been historicised? Historians have documented the affirmation of the individual in the last couple of centuries and sociologists have written extensively on the subjects that remain on everyone's lips, from individualism to personal development to the self-made man. But few studies of premodern history have focused explicitly on the individual as social agent. Philosophical genealogies of the modern self occasionally go back several centuries, but they tend to focus on the intellectual elites and the inner self. In turn, medievalists have seemed more interested in the chroniclers’ ideas of free will and divine providence than in the social strategies of the laity. Consequently, the late-medieval and the modern social self are often contrasted as two broadly different cultural types, leaving out the continuities in social practice and everyday life and, ultimately, the medieval roots of the modern individual agent. The social history of the individual agent in the later Middle Ages remains largely to be written – a history that is of interest beyond the study of the medieval past, because it provides the context for the transition to the modern era. Central to such a history is a cluster of issues ranging from society's role in modelling individual behaviour to social networks to individual strategies and resilience.