Questions not Constructs - How to replace bad ideas

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Fifty years ago, the medieval historian Elizabeth Brown published an article arguing that feudalism was not a useful concept. She demonstrates that few historians believe it accurately describes any significant part of even Western Europe for any significant period of time. Even historians who believe the term has limited accuracy for one place or another cannot agree on which places and times. Then, historians who use it as an economic model argue it cannot be used for politics, and vice versa. If it is a useful simplification, she concludes, what exactly does it simply and how is it useful?

Having made her case that "feudalism" is neither true nor useful, she then turns to the critical issue: when we deploy simplified constructs that we know to be untrue into our teaching, we are fundamentally lying to our students.

When David read this in graduate school in the late 90s, he was wholly persuaded. But as we wrote back in October, the medieval f-word continues to be taught throughout secondary education, at least in the United States, as well as appearing in most European and World history textbooks even at the college level. In fact, our post rapidly became our most-read piece in our newsletter by far, with lots of conversation on Bluesky, much of it summarizable as: "Wait. What?" In other words, the news of feudalism's falsity startled a lot of people, including historians working in other fields.

One consistent question that emerged from the online conversation that followed our post was ... now what? If we rip down feudalism as a construct, is there a better construct to use? How are we to teach medieval power and economics without some kind of construct, especially to middle schoolers (in American Middle Schools, feudalism is perhaps the main thing children learn about the European Middle Ages. It's a problem).

Here's one answer: Instead of trying to construct a system, an "ism", to encapsulate the stunning breadth of medieval Europe, could we instead ask a question? For example, at a given time and place, in what kinds of communal and hierarchal (horizontal and vertical) relationships did a person or a people find themselves? If we start with a question, then we can ask follow-up questions about agency, rights, privileges, obligations, stability, change over time, conflicts among those relationships, and more.

This is an approach that comes out of the work of Susan Reynolds from the 1980s. Reynolds is likely best known in the field for Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994), which argues that the formal medieval law on fiefs as described by medieval academics and practiced in courts are inventions of the later Middle Ages, never actually describing how land use was litigated or understood in the 11th and 12th centuries. But while that book makes the negative argument - NO FEUDALISM - her earlier work Kingdoms and Communities (Oxford, 1984) makes the positive argument. Reynolds argues that collective association (voluntary or not) and the horizontal bonds formed by collective association, provided the basis for medieval government, community formation, and identity.

Applying Reynolds' approach, instead of slapping a fake feudal pyramid down on top of a thousand years of European history, we think about people - real people - who lived within multiple, overlapping, sometimes conflicting networks. It looks - to us anyway - a lot more real. But because it starts with the simple question about relationships, perhaps it's translatable across education levels.

And it doesn't have to stop there. In 2016, Matt wrote an article on "Debating the 'Crusade' in Contemporary America," in which he wrote:

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice and the Gnat have a conversation about bugs: ‘What’s the use of them having names’, the Gnat said, ‘if they won’t answer to them?’ ‘No use to them’, said Alice, ‘but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?’

So, is 'crusade' useful to us, the namers? I'm beginning to think that it isn't. It has become a word that carries its baggage invisibly, a multivalent symbol that obscures rather than clarifies, that stands as a cipher for (almost) everything except an actual medieval phenomenon. Perhaps it is time to stop using 'crusade'altogether -- or, better, 'archive' the word. Remember its origins, what it has come to mean, and only deploy it sparingly. Scholars can then focus on the complex, changing relationship between religion and violence across the centuries, free from the baggage the word carries with it, free from the circular logic of arguing the 'real' meaning of a symbol.

In other words, 'crusade,' like 'feudalism,' is a construct that we could free ourselves from and instead ask questions like, what is the relationship between religion and violence in a given instance, a period of time, across the centuries, and so forth?

Constructs, by their nature, either curtail discussion or lead to discussions only about the constructs themselves. Questions, on the other hand, well, they're dangerous. Once you start asking genuine open questions about the past, there's no telling where you might go.

Note 1: This is our first post on our new host Buttondown. Unlike Substack, it's not free. But also unlike Substack, no Nazis are allowed on Buttondown and they don't have venture capitalists telling them what to do (Substack is "free" because someone else is paying the bills; they're doing it because they expect to make money). Modern Medieval will always offer a free subscription, but if you'd like to become a paid subscriber and help us defray the costs of running this site, please do!

Note 2: If you email David - lollardfish at gmail - he's happy to send you a pdf of the Tyranny of a Construct article. He wants everyone to read it.

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