The Serf, the Knight and the Historian
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5789222 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R I Moore (University of Newcastle Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 459-460 |
| Publication date | 2010-07-14 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0269-1191 • E-ISSN: 1477-4542 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fh/crq044 |
| OpenAlex | W2124065937 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
In the 1970s and 1980s it was accepted by almost all medievalists working both in and on France that not only French but Western European society had been suddenly and radically transformed in the decades on either side of the year 1000. The last remnants of Carolingian public justice, until this point more durable and more effective than had once been thought, were swept away by the proliferation of mounted warriors based on castles from which they dominated the surrounding countryside, reducing to serfdom as the labour force for a cereal-based agrarian economy a hitherto free peasantry, and constituting themselves into a reconstructed aristocratic order based on the skills of knighthood and the values of their code of chivalry. Hence the spectacular growth of the European economy and the urban and intellectual renaissance of the twelfth century, in which were forged the essential structures of the European ancien régime. This was the thesis of Georges Duby, originating in his examination of southern Maconnais society between the tenth and twelfth centuries (1951) and confirmed by a series of fine regional studies - and not only on regions of France - by his students and others in the following decades. Its conclusions were generalised, and its implications for cultural and religious as well as economic and social history explicated in a series of brilliant popularisations by Duby himself, culminating in Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme (1978) and Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre (1981). In 1980 it was enshrined in the prestigious nouvelle Clio series as La mutation féodale by two of Duby's students, Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, and remained the reigning orthodoxy until a review of its second edition, by yet another of Duby's students, Dominique Barthélemy, in Annales (1992), challenged it at every point, inaugurating one of the most vigorous, and far-reaching debates on medieval history of modern times
| Citations per year | 0.31 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2020 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |