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Historisk tidskrift 126:1 • 2006

Innehåll (Contents) 2006:1

Uppsatser (Articles)

Feudalisme og antropologi. Nye perspektiver på magt, orden og konfliktregulering i højmiddelalderen

Kim Esmark

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Summary

Feudalism and Anthropology. New Perspectives on High Medieval Power, Order, and Conflict Resolution

This article discusses important trends and problems in recent years’ historiography on political power, social order and dispute settlement in post-Carolingian Western Europe, primarily France.

Generations of historians have described the period between the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and the rise of effective kingship some 300 years later as a period of ”feudal anarchy” haunted by political fragmentation, dissolution of public and private authority and arbitrary violence. Within the last 30 years, however, this time-honoured interpretation has come under increasing attack. Scholars have pointed to its implicit roots in modern legalist conceptions of the state, law, property etc, and have questioned the use of anachronistic distinctions between public and private or between law and morals in historical analysis of a world where such categories did not yet exist.

To establish a more adequate analytical framework these scholars, pioneered by American historians Fredric Cheyette, Patrick Geary and Stephen D White, have turned to anthropology, to studies of social structure and dispute processing in traditional, non-Western, ”state-less” societies. Methodologically this has meant a shift from investigations of formal law and judicial institutions to microscopic, processual analysis of litigants’ practices. The result has been a new understanding of how people handled power, conflict, and violence in a society without central government or the legal machinery of later times. Special emphasis has been placed on the role of negotiable cultural norms, religious and political ceremonies, feud, gift-giving, informal arbitration, compromise, and mediation through horizontal bonds of kinship, friendship, and peerage.

The article traces the roots and contexts of this ”anthropological turn”: its inspiration from Marc Bloch’s historical sociology and especially from the young Georges Duby; its place within the heated debate of the 1990s about the supposed feudal transformation around the year 1000; the criticism raised against the use of ethnological theory and evidence; its relation to another current challenge to traditional conceptions of feudal society, Susan Reynolds’ book on fiefs and vassals; and finally its possible relevance for Scandinavian medieval history.

Keywords

middle ages, feudalism, power, dispute settlement, historiography, France, Scandinavia