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?
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
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.
the posti ng experience on this day lmao