i know a good number of us have been listening to Hell on Earth and while it’s been a decent primer for the sequence of events—the takes are quite spicy for historiography heads

here are the questions for the class:

What is Feudalism?

When did Feudalism End?

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    “Feudalism” is a weird and controversial topic for historians because at least recently there’s been a move to declare that “feudalism was never an actual thing” that revolves specifically around debunking the general pop culture idea of it but then expands to argue that because of the extreme difference in styles of government and laws across Europe alone - let alone every country that is often described as “feudal” - and between the earliest period that could be considered medieval and the early modern/modern period when “feudalism” was replaced with a more bourgeois monarchism and nationalism, that you cannot group these disparate things under one umbrella like “feudalism” at all.

    I disagree and think those historians are a bunch of pedantic liberals losing the forest for the trees. They’re correct in that you cannot describe any specific set of standards, laws, or systems between feudal entities, but they’re wrong in that specifically that sort of legalistic chaos where ultimately power was held based on hereditary titles, properties, and court politicking by warlords whose capacity for violence may or may not actually have been relevant at a given time should probably be considered a general thing that happens. You can’t say “ah yes in a feudal system you have exactly [list of titles] and they definitely follow this [list of laws]” but you can say “so a bunch of inbred fucks owned everything and ruled based on owning everything, and no no it’s quite different from our own system where a bunch of idle bastards own everything and rule based on owning everything because back then you needed a dozen generations of inbreeding to be allowed to own more than a house, and back then they had to launder their rule through a bunch of crony clergymen as compared to now when they launder their rule through crony politicians and propaganda rags!”

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 years ago

      disagree and think those historians are a bunch of pedantic liberals

      i mean its useful to explore the difference between medieval economoc/political arrangements and ‘modern’ ones. the simple fact we have a ruling class still doesn’t mean the character, origins, and activities of the modern one diverges sharply from the old ruling class. and the old ruling class was in most places violently overthrown.

      the “Tyranny of a Concept” historiographers aren’t exactly doing hagiography for shitty class society they’re just pointing out what happened doesn’t map well onto the theoretical models

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        There I’m specifically criticizing something I’ve seen a lot where historians attack a specific romanticized fantasy idea of feudalism as purely fictional in order to dismiss the entire concept or pretend that anytime someone says “feudalism” what they mean is this specific fiction that exists in the mind of pop culture fantasy consumers.

        I did sort of lose focus and switch from contrasting feudalism from bourgeois dictatorships to comparing them mid sentence after that, which I will defend by saying the site went down for me after I hit “post” so I couldn’t fix the jumbled rhetoric after rereading and didn’t even get confirmation it had posted until over an hour later.

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
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          2 years ago

          which I will defend by saying the site went down for me after I hit “post” so I couldn’t fix the jumbled rhetoric after rereading and didn’t even get confirmation it had posted until over an hour later

          the posti ng experience on this day lmao