Title: Fiefs and vassals : the medieval evidence reinterpreted /
Authors: Reynolds, Susan.
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 1994
Subjects: Middle Ages; Feudalism
Abstract: Fiefs and Vassals is a book that will change our view of the medieval world. Offering a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism, Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of fiefs and vassalage that have been central to the understanding of medieval society for hundreds of years are in fact based on a misunderstanding of the primary sources. Reynolds demonstrates convincingly that the ideas of fiefs and vassalage as currently understood, far from being the central structural elements of medieval social and economic relations, are a conceptual lens through which historians have focused the details of medieval life. This lens, according to Reynolds, distorts more than it clarifies. With the lens removed, the realities of medieval life will have the chance to appear as they really are: more various, more individual, more complex, and perhaps richer than has previously been supposed. This is a radical new examination of social relations within the noble class and between lords and their vassals, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages.
Contents: 1. The Problem of Feudalism. 1.1. The nature of the problem. 1.2. The historiography of feudalism. 1.3. The plan of the book -- 2. Vassalage and the Norms of Medieval Social Relations. 2.1. The concept of vassalage. 2.2. Some problems of the concept. 2.3. A substitute for the concept of vassalage: some medieval norms and values -- 3. Fiefs and Medieval Property Relations. 3.1. The concept of the fief. 3.2. Ideas of property. 3.3. A hypothesis about property law before 1100. 3.4. A hypothesis about property law after 1100 -- 4. Gaul and the Kingdom of the Franks. 4.1. The Merovingian period. 4.2. The Carolingians: vassi and benefices. 4.3. Full property under the Carolingians. 4.4. Counts and the problem of the end of the empire -- 5. The Kingdom of France, 900-1100. 5.1. The problems. 5.2. Government and political relations. 5.3. Benefices and the lands of counts and churches. 5.4. Other full property: alods and inheritances. 5.5. Fiefs --^