Teaching diagram of the Feudal Transformation, by me
This is an index to the various posts I have written reacting to scholarship wrestling with the big question of the Feudal Transformation. If you don’t know what that even is, start with no. 1… Or, I would advise, save your time and read something more soluble. Meanwhile, these posts exist as a kind of initial argument with myself and anyone else who’ll read it prior to my eventually trying to write about this huge subject succintly.
- Feudal Transformations, a reaction to the variation covered by Poly & Bournazel’s seminal text, The Feudal Transformation
- Feudal Transformations II, a short report on a systematic breakdown of the Transformation as seen by Josep María Salrach in 1998
- Feudal Transformations III, a reflection on Victor Farias’s saying that the nobility in positions of public power in Catalonia are actually reliant on the peasantry for support
- “Of course you realise this means war… ”, not strictly part of the series but a narrative of the events surrounding the Transformation as it’s held to have happened in Catalonia
- Feudal Transformations IV, a further reflection on Josep María Salrach, this time dealing with how the nobles control castles both before and after those events but not necessarily during
- Feudal Transformations V: el ‘Hipòtesi’ del Professor Riu, dealing with the ideas of long continuity of local power in various forms posited by Manuel Riu in his classic article, “Hipòtesi entorn dels orígens del feudalisme a Catalunya”
- Feudal Transformations VI: Chris Wickham suggests, the involvement of Chris’s ideas of what happens to power in the period of incastellamento via an article of his on Tuscany, also containing a list much like this of parts I to V
- Plz be respectin feudalizm: further opinions from Chris Wickham, not for some reason numbered, but should be in here, the first of several reactions to a Spoleto conference volume on feudalism, in which Chris’s introductory theoretical argument is found useful but not finally my answer
- Feudal Transformations VII: Michel Bur and the motte-and-bailey castle, second Spoleto response, arguing that monocausal explanations will never do
- Feudal Transformations VIII: two ways of confusing the issue, fourth Spoleto response, comparing German and South Italian cases through two very differently-styled articles
- When is a fief not a fief? (Feudal Transformations IX), Spoleto the fifth, arguing against Thomas Bisson that we cannot quantify feudalism by quantifying references to fiefs
- Feudal Transformations X: Stephen White vs. Thomas Bisson, 2nd round, finding problems both with Bisson’s schematism and White’s somewhat dehumanised takedown
- Feudal Transformations XI: Chris Wickham takes still another (at)tack, documenting Chris’s new attempts to describe change via the means of studying assemblies
- The unbearable emptiness of being post-Roman: Aragonese depopulation and the rest of the field (Feudal Transformations XII), a study of what the archæogical chronology does to the historians’ picture of this supposedly rapid and time-localised change
I’m sure there’ll be more; I haven’t solved it yet…
