In Memoriam: Elizabeth (Peggy) A.R. Brown
Remembering the woman who got us to rethink "feudalism"
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
We were very sad to hear the news that Elizabeth A.R. “Peggy” Brown passed away last week.
If you came to this newsletter because you found out there’s no such thing as feudalism, it’s because we read her article “The Tyranny of a Construct” in grad school. Years later, the work continues, as we discussed in our most popular post, “The Medieval F-Word” (it has 3-4x as many views as any other post we’ve done) and its followup “Questions not Constructs”
At the core of her critique, a simple premise: don’t lie to students.
She wrote:
To advocate teaching what is acknowledged to be deceptive and what must later be untaught reflects an unsettling attitude of condescension toward younger students…In addition, as the amount of time between the learning and unlearning of a concept increases, it becomes nearly impossible totally to correct the misconceptions that a student may have." Experts who knowingly mislead their students appear to be- unsure of their own ability to present a simplified account of the conclusions concerning medieval society that historians have now reached.
In our writing and teaching, we try to live up to this.
But Peggy did so much more than 1 article; she was a force of nature over the course of her long career.
By-and-large a historian of medieval France and its monarchs, her research changed the way we thought about how power operated in the European Middle Ages generally. But she never shied away from the individual and particularly loved the excitement of the archive (Matt met her for the first time in Paris and they had a long discussion about how to parse the different parts of a particular 12th-century manuscript - Peggy was, of course, correct in her reading). Even more importantly, she loved working with other medievalists, taking them seriously as scholars, challenging them, but ready to help them if at all she could. As detailed in her obituary, she also spent her career fighting sexism in the academy.
She will be missed. May her memory be a blessing.
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