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
- Feudal Transformations XIII: storing more and working less, a note about two attempts by students of Pierre Bonnassie’s to put some archæological flesh on the bones of his views on agricultural growth in the tenth and eleventh centuries
- Feudal Transformations XIV: Königsferne, exploring the possibilities of a paradigm of royal politics in which the status of kingship is the greater the further from the king one is
- Feudal Transformations XV: proving a negative with power relations in Catalonia, arguing that the documents of how castles were held and handed out in Catalonia in the period before the supposed transformation simply won’t support a reading as `feudal’ arrangements avant la lettre
- Feudal Transformations XVI: two fields or three?, wondering whether the shift to three-field agriculture needs to be in this story and if so where
- Another one not numbered in the series, but obviously following up on no. 14 above, looking at changes in castle tenure in Catalonia in charters from the run-up to the year 1000
- Feudal Transformations XVII: the scribes who take us through the mutation documentaire, a close reading of changing modes of social organisation in a charter by a scribe who remembered the way it used to be…
- Feudal Transformations XVIII: what’s behind it all?, a brief entanglement with Guy Bois’s book The Transformation of the Year 1000 over issues of demography and climate as causes of change
- Feudal Transformations XIX: change before the year 1000, a more thorough critique of Bois’s theory based (of course) on a comparison with Catalonia
I’m sure there’ll be more; I haven’t solved it yet…
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