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Feudal Culture - SOCIAL FORMATIONS II SOFO II
BA (Hons.) History
University of Delhi
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Introduction
please elaborate on your own - different aspects of feudal culture – tripartite schema, peasants and land, Christian thought and writings and art & architecture.
The tripartite schema
Around the 1000 AD, western sources depicted Christian society according to a new system which composed of a threefold people- priests, warriors and peasants. The three made the fabric of society.
Between the 8th and 11th century the aristocracy organized itself into a military class, a typical member of this class being called miles or knight.
In the Carolingian period, the clergy transformed themselves into a clerical caste. The evolution of the liturgy and of religious architecture is an expression of this change.
The conditions of the peasants became more uniform and to sink to the lowest level, that of the serfs.
The tripartite schema was a symbol of social harmony. It was a vivid way of diffusing class struggle and of mystifying people. Although it has been correctly observed that this schema aimed to keep the workers- economic class, the producers-in a state of submission to the other two classes, it has not been sufficiently noticed that the schema, which was dreamt up by the clergy, aimed also at subjugating the warriors to the priests, and making them the protectors of the church and religion.
A critical moment in the history of the tripartite model in a society comes when a new class appears which has not hitherto had a place in the system namely the mercantile class. This marked the change from a closed to an open economy and the emergence of a powerful productive class which was not content to submit itself to the clerical and military classes.
In the second half of the 12th century and during the course of the 13th the tripartite society was succeeded by the society of ‘estates’ that is to say of socio-professional conditions.
Peasants and Land
Property, whether as a fact or a concept was almost unknown in the middle ages. The peasants’ fields were only a concession on the part of the lord, who could revoke it fairly easily. The fields were often redistributed by the village community according to crop and field rotation.
The peasant was not bound to his land except by the will of his lord, from which he was eager to escape by flight in the early period and later on by legal emancipation. Individual or collective peasant emigration was one of the great phenomena of medieval society and population.
Christian Thought & Writings
The thing that was most obviously new about the culture in the early western middle ages was the relations which were being established between the pagan inheritance and Christian contribution, though each of these formed a coherent whole on its own. Early Christian writing, followed by those of the middle ages and since then a number of modern works devoted to the history of medieval civilization are filed with the debate or conflict between pagan culture and the Christian spirit. The two ways of thinking and feeling were opposed to each other.
Authors of the early western middle ages used the irreplaceable intellectual equipment of the graeco-roman world but at the same time made it conform to Christian thinking. Ancient thought
only survived in the middle ages in fragmented form. It was pushed out of shape and humiliated by Christian thought.
What the middle ages knew of the ancient culture had been bequeathed to it by the late Empire, which had rechewed, impoverished and dissected graeco-roman literature, science thought and art in such a way that the barbarized early middle ages could assimilate it more easily. Science was watered down into verses full of legends and moralizing lessons. The animals were changed into symbols.
The sources of medieval Christian thought were the treatises and poems of the third or fourth century such as the Historiae contra Paganos by Orosius who turned history into a vulgar apologia, the Psychomachia of Prudentius who reduced moral life to a combat between vices and virtues and Julianus Pomerius Treatise on the contemplative Life, which taught contempt for the world and for secular activities. The bible succumbed to exegesis. Thus, there was clearly an intellectual regression.
The most eminent of the Christian elite conscious of their cultural unworthiness compared with the last purists, renounced what they could acquire in the form of intellectual refinement so that they could make themselves accessible to their flocks. They chose to grow stupid in order to conquer. Augustine stated that “it was better to see oneself reproved by the grammarians rather than not understood by the people”.
There were a few brilliantly learned men between the 5th and 8th century that K. Rand has called the ‘founders of the middle ages’. Their role was to rescue the essential part of ancient civilization, to collect it in a form in which it could be assimilated by medieval minds and to give it the necessary Christian clothing. Four of them stand head and shoulders above the others: -
Boethius(c-524)- The middle ages owed all that it was to know of Aristotle before the 12th century to him. The middle ages was also indebted to Boethius for giving an exceptional place in his culture to music.
Cassiodorus(c-573)-The men of the middle ages owed the literary schemas of the Latin rhetors, which he introduced into the Christian literature and pedagogy.
Isidore of Seville(c-636)- The most famous pedagogy of the middle ages was passed on through his Etymologiae. It consisted of the teaching programme of the seven liberal arts.
4)Bede(c-735)- He gave voice to the most complete expression of the multiplicity of meaning in the scriptures and to the theory of the four meanings on which the whole of medieval biblical exegesis was to be based.
Feudal Art & Architecture
The eighth and ninth centuries were a formative period for medieval art & architecture. By the end of the ninth century fundamental attitudes to art had been established in the Latin, Greek and Islamic worlds, and the essential architectural forms that would characterise their religious structures for centuries to come had been defined. The architecture of the feudal period can be broadly divided into – Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic. Similarly, art can be broadly defined into Anglo Saxon, Byzantine, Carolingian, Gothic, Romanesque, Norman, Morrish and Insular. In the following paragraphs, we will focus on the Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic forms of both art and architecture.
Carolingian Art & Architecture
replacing it with a style where light appears to triumph over substance. The Gothic style was a totally new style in its day that transformed castles, churches, and cathedrals.
Similarly, Gothic art was largely facilitated by the concurrent growth of Gothic architecture. It was trying to move beyond the Dark ages into an era of confidence, radiance and prosperity, and later subsumed into Renaissance art.
Thus, the Feudal Age in Medieval Europe remains witness to the development of some of the finest
art and architectural styles that mankind has ever created.
Feudal Culture - SOCIAL FORMATIONS II SOFO II
Course: BA (Hons.) History
University: University of Delhi
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