Download PDF | John Hudson, Ana Rodríguez - Diverging paths_ the shapes of power and institutions in medieval Christendom and Islam-Brill (2014).
456 Pages
Preface
The present volume began with discussions of an important and straightforward question, to which the answers must be very complex: “why did certain sorts of institutionalisation and institutional continuity characterise government and society in Christendom by the later Middle Ages, but not the Islamic world, whereas the reverse end-point might have been predicted on the basis of the early medieval situation?” This core question situates the investigation within classic historiographical debates.
For example, is it correct to see Islamic society as dominated by orality? How can this view be reconciled with the considerable evidence for the use of documents? At the same time, the core question relates to matters of strong contemporary interest, for example the perceived characteristics of power exercised within Islamic Middle Eastern regimes.
The volume derives from a collaborative project, examining a group of questions in comparative fashion on the basis of the participants’ own research! Such collaboration and such an approach seeks to break down divisions internal to the historical discipline, divisions that have reinforced the definition of western and eastern cultural areas according to a number of criteria, among which religion is especially prominent. Taking-for-granted of these contained cultural areas has favoured the formation of closed scholarly communities with little or no contact. The gathering of a group of scholars therefore allows not merely geographical, chronological, and cultural comparison, but also that of historiographical traditions.
In addressing the core question, the volume aims to produce a number of preliminary interpretative answers, to which an integrated approach is central. The inclusion of the Byzantine Empire is crucial as the project attempts to avoid the simple comparison of Islam vs. Christendom, a comparison in danger of invoking assumptions of essentialist differences between civilisations.
The essays reveal that even though the whole Mediterranean basin shared a common classical legacy, institutions acquired divergent configurations in different areas and periods. However, formal or non-formal institutions cannot be equated with, respectively, efficient or non-efficient institutions, and the emphasis is not on problems of institutional failure or efficiency but rather on questions of institutional diversity.
The aim of the participants is to ascertain the institutional responses to common necessities of political and social control and regulation. This approach may illuminate not only essential institutional diversities, but also unexpected similarities. Different processes of comparison are developed through the book: parallel thematic analysis, for example of codification; parallel cases studies; comparison within individual papers; and throughout by consideration of a common set of questions and variables, analysed in relation to different regions, periods, institutions, and materials.”
To allow comparative exploration, three main areas of study were chosen. The first, law, has long been central to institutional history and remains highly fertile. The period under consideration is an essential one in the divergence of legal development within the regions studied, with the re-emergence of Roman Law, the beginning of the English Common Law tradition, and significant developments in Islamic Law. Institutionalisation through codification and professionalisation is a central topic, together with the relationship of law to other forms of specialist learning, particularly religious.
The second area, the funding of ruling powers, also has a long tradition of institutional study. However, the approach taken here is deliberately distanced from the older constitutional tradition, concentrating instead on the relationship of the funding of regimes, their changing institutional nature, and the development and exploitation of the economy. Issues of property law, taxation, and monetisation are therefore central, whilst divisions between economic, political, and administrative history are necessarily broken down.
In particular, aspects of the exploitation of resources in the Islamic world are examined in papers that might seem to bring them closer to those manifest in areas of Christendom or to distance them from Christendom; the intricacies of comparison, divergence and convergence are thereby emphasized. The third area, palaces and places, is particularly useful for examining how new institutions grew up, and the relationship of this issue to that of regulation, particularly apparent in the development of western monasticism. Furthermore, palaces provide a test case for the exertion and exemplification of a regime’s power both in the presence and the absence of the ruler.
The three areas were deliberately integrated in their matter, for example concerning specialist knowledge, communication, and exclusion of dissent. Analytical questions and themes recur. The issue of periodisation, of different chronologies in different aspects, and of varying speed of change at different times, all have to be inter-related with the issues of uniformity and divergence within the three geographical and cultural areas, Islam, Byzantium, and Western Christendom. A further central issue is that of continuity and selfreproduction.
Much enquiry therefore focuses on institutional identity and memory, and their relationship to orality, literacy, the technologies of recordkeeping and bureaucracy. Differences of evidence production and survival are part of the area of investigation, and part of the answer, rather than simply a matter of “sources.”
Issues of power, both individual and collective, are also raised. Institutions had a role in the reproduction of social organisation and in determining processes, degrees, and velocities of social mobility, for example through specialist knowledge and through control of office. Institutions might also be considered as fora for distributing power and as arenas wherein social conflict took place, creating public spaces of confrontation and generating certain obligations and rules. Self-conscious continuity was a tool of legitimacy, especially in a context of struggle, whilst power relations could be masked through institutions.
At the same time, broader questions of a less functional nature retain their importance for the historian. How important and how different were distinctions between lay and clerical in Islam, Byzantium, and Western Christendom, and what effect did these distinctions have? How far should the impetus to institutionalisation be seen as bottom-up or top-down, or what is the varying combination of the two? Is there an identifiable pattern of development in Western Christendom towards more complex institutions, perhaps to be contrasted with a pattern of increasing simplicity in the Islamic world?
Often, as might be expected in an initial investigation, the papers will reach specific conclusions but also comparative questions, yet some initial comparative conclusions also emerge.
A further purpose of this project has been to work towards a better picture of medieval institutions and institutionalisation for use in contemporary debate, notably over the character of Europe. By concentrating on the problem of the diverse shapes that institutions took in different societies, the present study seeks to take into account post-Eurocentric narratives particularly from the social sciences, which insist on the necessity of highlighting the “fluidity and connectivity of people, ideas and political structures,”? whilst continuing to operate within a rigorously comparative framework of medieval historical analysis.
Since at least the late 19th century, social scientific scholarship has acknowledged the importance of medieval studies to present-day understandings of Europe, whether those understandings approach “Europe” as a concept; as a complex set of economic and political institutions in its own right; or as a historical “stage” on which institutions and individuals alike operate on a dayto-day basis.*
More recently, a small but increasingly significant body of social scientific research has sought to explain Europe’s (economic) present through the modelling of its medieval past.5 Such authors have stressed the importance of economic institutions in the shaping of western development in the Modern era, comparing them with their Islamic counterparts; the latter are defined as atomistic enterprises in which cooperation was temporary, in contrast with the long-term character that marked western institutions. Such works suggest that a thoroughly researched historical approach to institutions and processes of institutionalisation in the Middle Ages is badly needed.
In addition, intensified globalisation and processes of European integration and fragmentation have contributed to a widespread consensus that the ground is shifting beneath established political institutions, practices, and concepts. This consensus has led in turn to social scientific calls for “new medieval” or “neo-medieval” conceptualisations of territoriality and sovereignty — conceptualisations that are “capable of superseding traditional realist or functionalist approaches to Europe and the European Union.”
The “new medieval” heralded by political scientists, legal scholars and sociologists — as well as via newspapers, television and other public media outlets — is itself, however, premised on outdated understandings of “the” medieval, perpetuating parochial perspectives linked to nationalist and colonial concerns of the igth century.
One of the effects of the “new medieval” in legal and social science scholarship has thus been to reify the very divisions and binary oppositions that present-day medieval scholarship seeks to challenge: East vs. West; Islam vs. Christianity; the “Middle Ages” vs. Modernity. It is the task of medievalists to inform and thereby to raise the level of modern debate.
The Editors would like to thank Nora Bartlett for compiling the Index; V. Arantza del Barro for copy-editing; s1G Service in the CcHs-csic for the maps; Rob Bartlett, Eduardo Manzano, Sarah Greer and Cory Hitt for editorial help.
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