CURRENTLY SOLD OUT

Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time by Kathleen Davis (Paperback, 2017)

About this product

Product Information

Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea of a division between a medieval and a modern period has survived, even flourished, in academia. Periodization and Sovereignty demonstrates that this survival is no innocent affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of the Middle Ages and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism. This book's groundbreaking investigation of feudal historiography finds that the historical formation of feudalism mediated the theorization of sovereignty and a social contract, even as it provided a rationale for colonialism and facilitated the disavowal of slavery. Sovereignty is also at the heart of today's often violent struggles over secular and religious politics, and Davis traces the relationship between these struggles and the narrative of secularization, which grounds itself in a period divide between a modern historical consciousness and a theologically entrapped Middle Ages incapable of history. This alignment of sovereignty, the secular, and the conceptualization of historical time, which relies essentially upon a medieval/modern divide, both underlies and regulates today's volatile debates over world politics. The problem of defining the limits of our most fundamental political concepts cannot be extricated, Davis argues, from the periodizing operations that constituted them, and that continue today to obscure the process by which feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time.

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN-139780812224122
eBay Product ID (ePID)3046392040

Product Key Features

Publication Year2017
SubjectHistory
Number of Pages200 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication NamePeriodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time
TypeTextbook
AuthorKathleen Davis
FormatPaperback

Dimensions

Item Height229 mm
Item Width152 mm

Additional Product Features

Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorKathleen Davis
Series TitleThe Middle Ages Series