Feudalism: New Landscapes of Debate

This up-to-date discussion takes as its starting point the challenge to the traditional notion of feudalism in the twenty-five years since the publication of Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel's work on the 'mutation feodale' and Susan Reynolds's attack on the very idea of a feudal society in the Middle Ages. While these challenges have presented a new picture of Western Europe in the so-called feudal age, one more focused than the traditional model of feudalism was, no new scholarly consens…