Kathleen Davis

Periodization and “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation

The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material effects of the becoming of the Middle Ages and its relationship to conditions of globalization. On the other hand, “the medieval globe” brings to bear a comparative focus that does not ask when and why a given culture did or did not start making the shift toward modernity, but rather asks what was going on at a given period throughout the globe. Such a history might undo the foundational narratives of European nations as well as give space to hitherto slighted histories. This conversation approaches the complexities of this problem from two perspectives: that of a scholar in European studies and a scholar in Chinese studies.

Timelines: Feudalism, Secularity and Early Modernity

This essay advances an argument regarding the structure of periodisation and the ways in which it limits critique of imperial historiography. It focuses first on the history and structure of medieval/modern periodisation and its relationship to the more recently popular ‘early modern’, and then turns briefly to the historiography of feudalism, an important anchor of the period concept, ‘the Middle Ages’. It then attends in more detail to the historiography of secularisation, particularly the recent tendency to find a secularising impulse in the texts of ‘early modern’ authors such as Vitoria and Grotius, which ultimately reinscribes the imperial logic that Subaltern Studies has worked to critique.