At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000 (review)

"There are few kudos—and many stinging darts—for the historian who wants to generalize," writes David Levine (p. 412), in a disarmingly self-revealing afterword to At the Dawn of Modernity. In a remarkably productive publishing career, Levine has ranged widely from the very particular and empirical to the broadly synthetic and interpretational. His earliest work (including Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism [1977]) was part of the pioneering phase of the development of English historical demography, in particular the data-intensive reconstitution of births, marriages, and deaths in English parish records from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. With Keith Wrightson he coauthored what still stand as two of the finest intensive case studies in the social history of English villages (Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 [1979; 2nd edition, 1995] and The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560- 1765 [1991]), both of which combined the histories of population and family with their larger contexts of religious change and economic development. In Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (1987), on the other hand, he turned away from quantitative, empirical, data-driven research to address nothing less than the history of the English family in its political and cultural contexts since 1066—in particular, the conundrum of why England was the first industrializing society and how its economic development and its social structure intertwined.

At the Dawn of Modernity is bolder still. Conventionally, historians regard the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries as the "early modern" period. Here, Levine argues that the roots of "modernity" lie much earlier, and comprise a very different bundle of interwoven factors from those of conventional theory. In fact, the ten generations or so who lived in northwestern Europe during the period from roughly 1000 to roughly 1300 experienced the first phase of "early modernization." During those ten generations, a positive feedback system—an extended historical moment—set northwestern Europe off on its distinctive path. Most importantly, a new set of power relationships—in Levine-language, and in his own, distinctive, use of the phrase "political economy"—coalesced. The term for this system here is, unabashedly, "feudalism"; its wielders, "feudalists." That means several things. By around 1000, the last remnants of the slave system of late antiquity and the barbarian masses had been submerged into something like a fairly homogenous, legally unfree peasantry, subordinated to those "feudalists," lords and aristocrats, in a relationship that was exploitative but also in some ways semicontractual. All in turn subsisted within the powers of fragmented but centralizing nation-states and an aggressive, reform-minded Church.

If the synopsis so far reads somewhat like a conventional textbook of high-medieval history, the effect is intentional: throughout his book, Levine delights in revisiting what to the unwary will seem like Middle Ages 101. (There are narrative excurses on William Marshall, Jeanne d'Arc, and Martin Luther, among others.) Nonetheless, much of this is setting up for the central, and most original, parts of his argument. Levine contends that the locus for much of the dynamism of the period—the motive force for the "early modernization"—lay in the distinctive family, household, and community economy of the peasantry. This in turn was a result of the forms that feudal lords' demands took, the successful inculcation by the Church of a particular model of marriage, and the demographic expansion of the period (from 1000 to 1300 the population of northwestern Europe grew as much as sixfold). As that expansion continued, the peasant household system—that is to say, the combination of late marriage for both sexes, predominance of nuclear households, and de facto disinheritance of younger sons that was distinctive in global perspective to northwestern Europe and that, Levine...