Explores medieval history by combining infographics, cartoons, and text to highlight aspects of the diversity and intercultural dynamics of the medieval world, from Europe to the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Islamic empires.

"Uses a feudal model to analyze contemporary American society, comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies"--Provided by publisher.

While the medieval period is often written off as a backward and benighted era, it was, in fact, marked by advances in wind and water power, agriculture, navigation, timekeeping, and military technology. The invention of the printing press near the end of the Middle Ages ushered in the early modern period. The achievements of this era—in particular the fabrication of scientific instruments, the development of commerce, rising urbanization, and the invention of the steam engine—laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Readers will be engrossed by this information-packed title and come away with a real understanding of how technology develops over time, building, by fits and spurts, on the technology already in use.

Annotation. Feudal Society discusses the economic and social conditions in which feudalism developed providing a deep understanding of the processes at work in medieval Europe.

"From castles and knights to the danger of bathroom breaks in the Middle Ages, readers discover 50 amazing and amusing facts about cleaning up--or not--during the Middle Ages."--

This is a study of the feudal nobles in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem; their status in Palestinian society, their lordships and their political ideas; and the development of these ideas as expressed in constitutional conflicts with kings and regents from 1174 to 1277.

Dominique Barthélemy presents a sharply revisionist account of the history of France around the year 1000, challenging the traditional view that France underwent a kind of revolution at the millennium which ushered in feudalism.

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.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.

Essays largely on Studies in the development of capitalism, by M. Dobb.