The eleventh century in Eurasian history: A comparative approach to the convergence and divergence of medieval civilizations

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 1-21

  Moore, R I ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60949644458     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-33-1-1     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. I borrow the term from Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:105-9. It is unnecessary for the present purpose to enter the notorious and unending thickets of definition which have sprouted around the terms city and civilization (the latter used by me in a nonevaluative sense to denote common acceptance of, or subordination to, a given high culture).
2. For a sharp and helpful recent discussion in a broad historical context, see Peter Bogucki, The Origins of Human Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 331-35.
3. See, for example, the table of contents in J. M. Roberts, The History of the World (London: Hutchinson, 1976);
4. the chapter titled "The World of Divided Regions," in Richard Overy, ed., The Times History of the World, 5th ed. (London: Times Books, 1999), 94;
5. and "a world riven into sundered cultures," Felipe Fernando Armesto, Millennium (London: Bantam Press, 1995), 5.
6. Willam H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 418.
7. "This was India's third urbanization, if we take the first to have been that of the Indus and pre-Indian northwest, and the second that of the Gangetic plain in pre-Mauryan times. In contrast to the first two moments of urban development, when towns were sparse and uniquely the sites of state-level authority, those of the early medieval age appeared in rich profusion, reflecting a wide dispersion of authority and close relations between political centers and the community base upon which the states were founded." Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 124.
8. Contrast Clive Ponting, World History: A New Perspective (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 350, claiming that world population doubled between 1000 and 500 B.C.E. and doubled again by 1 C.E., but then "a long period" - in fact, the millennium - "of relative stagnation set in." This shows how misleading crude statistics (even supposing them to be accurate) can be: here they conceal the important contrast between the swollen cities precariously oppressing relatively underdeveloped agriculture at the beginning of the first millennium C.E. and the much smaller but far more numerous, soundly infrastructured, and potentially dynamic cities to be seen everywhere by the end of the millennium, or shortly thereafter.
9. Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China, trans. Mark Elvin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1970), 89;
10. Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1.
11. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 63-89;
12. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (1985; repr. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 15-41.
13. Though of more marginal importance, Buddhist temples in China also generated similar kinds of developments; see Jean Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, trans. F. Verellen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 94-116.
14. For a recent European survey which brings out this point very clearly, see Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe (London: Harper Collins, 1997).
15. See especially A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 120-33, 192-95;
16. Paul Magdalino, "Enlightenment and Repression in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Evidence of the Canonists," in N. Oikonomides, ed., Byzantium in the Twelfth Century: Canon Law, State, and Society (Athens: Society of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, 1991), 359-73.
17. Cf. Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1966), 252-53;
18. Stein, Peasant State, 213-53.
19. On the other hand, Conrad Totman, A History of Japan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 106, dismisses the view that the foundation of the Kamikura bakufu in Japan in the 1180s signalled a fundamental change of direction, yet even so, he acknowledges that "a basic restructuring that slowly, violently dismantled the old order, opening the way for the creation of a new one" characterized the centuries "after 1250 or so." I am unable to offer any comment on contemporary developments in Southeast Asia.
20. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927; repr. New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 368.
21. John King Fairbank, A New History of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 93-95.
22. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 3:42, 153.
23. See especially George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
24. Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 69-90.
25. Ibid., 175.
26. R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
27. Peter Bol, "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Traditions in Tang and Sung China (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1992);
28. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice. In gratefully plundering these works for my own purposes I do not pretend to offer a complete or balanced discussion of their authors' views; in particular it should be noted that Chamberlain also compares the developments he describes with their counterparts in Latin Europe and Song China.
29. Bol, "This Culture of Ours," 128-92.
30. Ibid., 50-51.
31. Statistics are from Fairbank, New History of China, 94-95, largely drawing on John W. Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Song China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
32. Robert P. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou, Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), quotation at 176.
33. Although Chamberlain's study, Knowledge and Social Practice, is formally limited to a period somewhat later (1190-1350) than that upon which this paper is focused, the general conditions in which its protagonists operated (and which are brilliantly discussed by Chamberlain) arose from the decline of the Abbasid Caliphate and the emergence of warrior regimes throughout the Middle East in the tenth and eleventh centuries: the Buyid occupation of Baghdad in 926 is often taken as the turning point.
34. See especially Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 6-34, but note also the same author's skepticism of the role of the so-called western family in the origins of capitalism, e.g., in Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162-204.
35. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 182-90.
36. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice, 4.
37. See Moore, First European Revolution, 75-81,
38. and works there cited; especially Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St. Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989);
39. and George W. Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000-1320 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
40. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice, 106.
41. Which for western Europe has been begun by C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985);
42. and The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
43. Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum, trans. Betty Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1974), 79.
44. Michael Clanchy, Abélard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 289-92.
45. Historia calamitatum, 88;
46. R. H. Bautier, "Paris au temps d'Abelard," in Jean Jolivet, ed., Abélard en son temps (Paris: Belles lettres, 1981), 21-77.
47. For example, for a discussion that nicely brings out the intimate relationship between the intellectual and the political aspects of Berengar's tribulations, see Heinrich Ficht-enau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000-1200 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 286-93.
48. John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1956), 19.
49. R. W Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Volume 1: Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 225-27.
50. Fairbank, Short History of China, 106.
51. Ibid., 96-97;
52. Bol, " This Culture of 'Ours," 212-53;
53. James T. C. Liu, Reform in Sung China: Wang An-Shih and His New Policies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
54. William H. McNeill, "A Defence of World History," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 32 (1982): 75-89.
55. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17.
56. For a fuller statement of the argument of this paragraph, and a fairer appreciation of the progress of contemporary historiography, see R. I. Moore, "World History," in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 941-59.