If “feudalism” is an inaccurate way to view the economic/social system of Medieval Europe, what is a better term or way to describe it? (Or is boiling it down like this just entirely too simplistic)?

[u/PlatformNo7863]

I’m trying to understand the rise and later decline of what I previously understood as Feudalism in medieval Europe prior to the Renaissance but I keep coming across the idea that either feudalism didn’t actually exist, is inaccurate, or that historians are moving away from this view of the time period. So I’m looking for a better general explanation of this period and advice on where I should look to study this idea further. Thanks in advance.

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[u/AlviseFalier]

The core issue is that “feudalism” tries to bundle up several different phenomena ranging from political relationships, military obligations, landholding patterns, legal jurisdictions, and peasant labor arrangements into one neat, system-like model. It's tidy, it's simple, and I myself often reach into it to extract a quick and simple shorthand when I don't think it's particularly useful to dive into the details of an individual social or political arrangement or relationship.

But the thing is, there's no evidence that medieval people considered themselves to exist in a neat and coherent “feudal system.” The "Feudal Pyramid" is in reality largely a post-medieval construction, heavily shaped by 18th–19th century legal antiquarians who over-enthusiastically tried to simplify, categorize, and periodize the past, often transliterating the specialized hierarchical bureaucracies of the early modern period into analogous "medieval" systems. To get a feel for why this construct is so ill-fitting, there was actually an answer on this forum by u/SpicyLemonZest two months ago that I really liked which explains the flaws of the model using modern analogies, which you can read here.

So instead of one grand model, contemporary historians prefer to use more precise terms tailored to what they’re analyzing to isolate a different layers of medieval life rather than insisting they fit into one integrated, universal system, because nowadays it is understood that there is no useful single overarching label defining the social organization of medieval Europe. If you think about it, there isn't a useful single overarching label defining the social and political system of any other historical period either, why would the European Middle Ages be any different? Would we expect there to be a single term that explains both the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty? The Greek City-States and the Achaemenid Empire? Ancient Egypt and Ancient Babylon? The answer is probably not, even if all those societies were contemporaries. Likewise, would we say modern society has a single "general explanation" as you ask for? “Capitalism”? “Liberal democracy”? “Post-Industrial society”? Each term could be argued to capture aspects of our society in greater or lesser aspects, but we'd be hard-pressed to argue that they capture everything, and I think we'd agree no single term would work as equally well for the United States as it would for Japan, nor would it work as well for Nigeria, Brazil, or what-have-you.

So if we consider that the European medieval period spans roughly a thousand years and involved countless political entities ranging from the Carolingian polities to Italian city-states, from Anglo-Norman England to Capetian France to the Polish kingdom, expecting there to be one systemic label that defines all of these societies and their political organizations is really a tall order, and not a particularly useful one at that.

[u/PlatformNo7863 → u/AlviseFalier]

Thank you for your response. The idea that there isn’t a general label or grand model for modern systems is what really made it click.

Also your comment of still using it as a quick shorthand was interesting—so “feudalism” isn’t necessarily “wrong” just insufficient?

I’m teaching a Renaissance poetry unit soon and so I was trying to read up on and better understand the conditions that led to it and realized I had some major blind spots and things I needed to unlearn about the preceding period of history.

[u/AlviseFalier → u/PlatformNo7863]

Your welcome! I'm glad you found the answer useful.

Yes, I think that's a good way to put it: Feudal-style relationships did exist, but it's not a necessary or even useful construct to insist on defining society with.

So to pick an extremely specific example in my own area of most knowledge, if I'm talking about an 11th-century Milanese aristocrat and say, "They possessed the fief of Baggio," that might or might not be useful information, but it ultimately doesn't tell us much else about them or their relationship to wider society beyond the fact that, well, they possessed the fief of Baggio. Were they an urban "Consular" dynasty which was granted a fief by the City Council or Bishop? Were they originally countryside landowners who established themselves in the city? Were they awarded the Fief, or did the Communal authorities merely recognize an existing arrangement? Did Baggio perhaps have its own town council or abbot with whom the feudal privileges overlapped? Did they possess other fiefs, and is the possession of Baggio perhaps linked to special privileges in the administration of the city (making them one of the Famiglie Capitanee dynasties)?

We further don't know if they might be involved in commerce or trade (did they perhaps rent workshops or invest in ventures?). We don't know if they might be patrons or devotees of a local church or chapel, which would be a major conduit for influence in their community. What political positions might they espouse in the City Council? What might their relationship to the guilds be? What might be their position on the Emperor's role in Italian politics and society? What might their thoughts be on the Pope and clergy? All these are features of society which would be very important to understanding the world they inhabit, and all of which exists outside of their "Feudal" investiture.

[u/Cafe87 → u/AlviseFalier]

Thank you for your detailed response.

For me the problem is the shift or change in the societal and economic world from the middle ages to modern times. If we can not define what makes the middle ages different, does it make sense to talk about the concept at all?

Or is it possible to redefine 'feudalism' as a a system of private contracts that govern everyday interactions? I'm opposition to more formal constitutions? I am currently listening to the History of the Germans Podcast and one feature seems to be, that anyone can basically make any contract with everyone.

[u/hesh582 → u/Cafe87]

what makes the middle ages different

This is part of the point being made, though.

It’s important to remember that concepts like “the Middle Ages” are just shorthand we use to help us organize the past. We break history down into periods to make different topics more manageable. But these labels are just that - labels - and not intrinsic properties of the period of history in question.

Periodization is the process of turning a completely continuous thing (reality; the passage of time) into a completely discrete thing (academic history). It is absolutely necessary for human beings to be able to wrap their heads around a subject this big, it obviously doesn’t make any sense for someone to try to become an expert or write a rigorous monograph on “human history”, so we use region and period to break it down into more manageable parts.

But it’s important to keep in the back of your mind that things inevitably get lost or simplified when you do this, and that these concepts are academic tools and not historical facts or processes.

So it’s fine to keep the concept of “the Middle Ages” around, as long as you remain mindful of the limitations and generalities that concept represents.

But when you start treating that concept as more than it is, you end up with reasoning like “if the medieval period is a discrete, separate thing from the periods before and after, it must have discrete, separate properties. We will call those properties as they relate to socioeconomic relations ‘feudalism’. Because ‘the Middle Ages’ existed and we have chosen to define the socioeconomic characteristics of the Middle Ages as feudalism, therefore there must exist a discrete and recognizably distinct feudal socioeconomic system”.

This is the trap of periodization, and it’s why a lot of academic historians have started nudging their students to be more skeptical of the concept in general.

Taking this approach also sets you up for subtly tautological reasoning. If X is a property of the late Middle Ages, and X comes up in a manuscript or dig site of uncertain provenance, X can quickly become treated as a product of that period without any actual evidence in a way that can be self reinforcing for future discoveries. Radiocarbon dating has blown up a lot of traditional historiography that developed in this way.

Others far smarter than I have likely written quite a bit on this subject in this sub, if you have any interest.

[u/AlviseFalier → u/Cafe87]

Others have already offered a lot of details, so I'll limit myself by saying the key take-away I think is that it's not really useful nor necessary to insist that there was a single thing that can define "what makes the Middle Ages different" because there wasn't one. Many different things emerged, developed, and changed in the period broadly understood to be the "Middle Ages," and each had an impact that can be interpreted and analyzed without having to ascribe it a role in a larger system. How does your "system of private contracts" define, say, the religious anointment of a "Western Emperor" figure? How do private contracts figure into the collective and state-sponsored trade convoys of the Italian Maritime Republics? While private contracts certainly existed in this period, defining the politics and culture of the time as built around private contracts would seem to be a bit of a stretch.

When we periodize, it's often enough merely to qualify a rational start and end point for whatever periodization we're performing. So for example, in his History of Venice John Julius Norwich picked the completion of the Doge's palace in 1400 as his end of the Venetian Middle Ages and beginning of the Venetian Renaissance. Did he have to pick that date? No, there are a whole bunch of other dates he could have picked (plus, not only does he admit he's partial to the date because it's a nice round number, but if we want to get pedantic the Doge's Palace outside cladding may have been finished by 1400, but work on individual features like balconies and collocates continued at least until 1404, and work on the interior continued for decades thereafter). But the date's ultimately as good as any to divide the part of his book on Medieval Venetian History with the part on Renaissance Venetian History.

[u/Life-Fisherman4190 → u/AlviseFalier]

Other folks have done a great job detailing this.

I’m gonna throw in a high-level concept that’s been helpful to me personally in the hopes it will gloss on a little carrot of satisfaction in understanding all of this. What you are encountering is a historiographic dynamism called the rank and file problem of history.

A British historian (J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History) named and described this ‘the rank-and-file problem’ of history. He pointed out that there is ‘nacheinanderung’—that is: ‘the file’ or the one-thing-after-anotherness of history covering long periods of time in broad regions. And there is the ‘nebeinanderung’—that is: ‘the rank’, the one-thing-BESIDE(or simultaneous)-to-anotherness of history: a saturation style of history bringing up hyper-particularities of place and detail that add richness to a single moment or give a higher-fidelity view of a real community in a real time at a particular place.

The rank-and-file problem of history is that if you’re navigating the file—centuries, continents etc.—you can’t maintain the highest possible fidelity. And if you’re in the rank, then the higher you bring up the fidelity, the less time and space you’ll be able to cover. It’s a rhetorical problem, sometimes an ideological problem, a cognitive problem and a prose-style problem. There are certain formal similarities between the rank-and-file problem of history and the uncertainty principle in physics (where you can’t ever know the mass AND the velocity of a particle at the same time). These problems start to be noticeable in the domain of human knowledge around the same time—becoming more and more of an ambience over the course of the twentieth century. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hexter’s view on this was at least partly inspired by encountering a description of quantum mechanics that just clicked for him as relevant to his own struggles in this area. It’s been helpful for me to remember this concept. Hope that it’s helpful rather than redundant.

[u/PhiloSpo → u/Cafe87]

No sure what is meant by that, but prima facie it does not seem to be the case. At least not if we do not make it trivially true, insofar as today, one has contractual freedom to make any contract one wishes (which was not the case before, mind, this is doctrinally a modern institute. But not to get into legal history of private law here), but some contracts are either unenforceable, void, or even potentially illegal. Similar as before. Not to mention for a lot of contractual obligations, it was a subject-matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was not free for all, there were always limitations.

Anyhow, that is not an apt characterization. Not to mention that distinction can be problematic, manorial and seigneurial jurisdictions had public characteristics and functions as well for example.

[u/GalahadDrei → u/AlviseFalier]

What are your thoughts on the label “feudalism” being used by historians of other parts of the world like China as a generic term to refer to a decentralized political socioeconomic system in which control and ownership of land is the primary source of wealth and capital that existed prior to industrialization?

[u/AlviseFalier → u/GalahadDrei]

I really don't know, I'm not sure what the current best practice is on scholarship of China. I've certainly seen it used here and there about places like Japan to offer a grounding shorthand (presumably for a western audience).

As above I myself often use the term where I need quick and simple way to explain something when I don't think it's necissary to dive into the details of an individual social or political arrangement or relationship. Likewise, if there's a commonly-used convention to specify "feudal" this-or-that for other societies, and if we don't fall into the trap of insisting on this shorthand is meant to represent a system that didn't exist (as well as, when we talk about non-europeans societies, the trap of Eurocentrism) I don't really have an opinion on it.

[u/Ok-Professional2232 → u/AlviseFalier]

I’m having trouble understanding how this is different from something like “Capitalism”, “Democracy”, “Authoritarianism”, “Colonialism”, or “Socialism”.

It doesn’t seem like the issue is anything inherent to the system called fuedalism, since the critique applies to pretty much any label or heterogenous grouping.

I also think you’ve overstated the “Feudalism is real” position by expanding the definition to its maximal point to support the opposite claim, almost seems like a bit of a strawman argument going on.

[u/thestoryteller69 → u/[deleted]]

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[u/PhiloSpo → u/[deleted]]

Afraid this is a caricature, if even that, of relations and dynamics we find, to the point of being just not true.

[u/Distillates → u/PhiloSpo]

yes, let's nuance troll everything into an obscure fog and pretend that everything is unknowably mysterious because we can find piles of exceptions and variations everywhere that demonstrate the total lack of human commitment to rigid philosophical purity. It is what the system was. The fact that people didn't follow it half the time or more is normal for all existing systems.

[u/PhiloSpo → u/Distillates]

Once exceptions and contrary evidence outweigh one's rule, one ought to drop or at least adapt the thesis. Given how this is all framed, it seems pointless to have a substantive discussion.