Feudal Society, V 2 (Paper Only): 002

by Bloch (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1964

  $12.56

  Few have set themselves to the formidable task of reconstructing and analyzing a whole human environment; fewer still have succeeded. Bloch dared to do this and was successful; therein lies the enduring achievement of Feudal Society. --Charles Garside, Yale Review

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $7.33

  Feudal Society is the masterpiece of one of the greatest historians of the century. Marc Bloch's supreme achievement was to recreate the vivid and complex world of Western Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. For Bloch history was a living organism, and to write of it was an endless process of creative evolution and of growing understanding. The author treats feudalism as a vitalising force in European society. He surveys the social and economic conditions in which feudalism developed; he sees the structures of kinship which underlay the formal relationships of vassal and overlord. For Bloch these relationships are mutual as much as coercive, the product of a dangerous and uncertain world. His insights into the lives of the nobility and the clergy and his deep understanding of the processes at work in medieval Europe, are profound and memorable.