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

The transformations evident in almost every aspect of life in western—especially northwestern—Europe between ca. 1000 and ca. 1250 were more profound than anything that happened during the preceding or subsequent centuries. The Europe that we know today was fundamentally configured, not in the Carolingian age, or during the Renaissance or Reformation, but in the course of the "long twelfth century": in demographic, economic, social, religious, cultural, and political terms, that century set the stage for the "European miracle." In one form or another this story has, in recent decades, been told by a distinguished array of historians: Jacques Le Goff, Robert Bartlett, the late R. W. Southern, and, as lately as 2000, R. I. Moore, whose trenchant interpretive monograph on the period is tellingly entitled The First European Revolution.

David Levine now adds his voice to the chorus. He has produced a comprehensive and stimulating conspectus of the period, with substantial sections on the "feudal revolution" in England, France, and Germany; on Gregorian reform; on new governmental and educational institutions; on urbanization and other signs of economic growth; on rural colonization and production, and the varieties of "unfreedom" that seigneurial control of those processes imposed; and on the impact on all these of the Black Death, which (for Levine as for many other scholars) set European history on a significantly altered course. Throughout, a mass of secondary material, bearing especially on England but with many Continental comparisons, is deftly synthesized. Levine describes himself as a historical sociologist seeking the larger picture from the writings of those who grapple with the evidence—but he adds many acute observations of his own, and the overall argument is distinctively sustained.

If the general effect remains familiar, even in places a little dated, it is because Levine's "bricolage" has not always led him to the latest studies, or the ones most widely admired by specialists. This is evident in his somewhat Huizinga-esque view of the post-Black Death later Middle Ages; in his espousal of the technological determinism of stirrup and plough in the early Middle Ages; and in his brisk dismissal of those who would abandon the concept of "feudal society." Where Levine is at his most original and powerful is in his detailed exploration of the microfoundations of the changes he describes: in his discussion of family formation. He comes to this as an acknowledged expert on the demographic history of early modern England, and in extending his purview he offers a genuinely novel contribution. First, he makes a strong case (inevitably conjectural, given the lack of clear evidence, but broadly persuasive nevertheless) for the northwestern pattern of delayed, "Malthusian," marriage and nuclear-family households as having originated before 1000. Then, unlike many demographers, he sets that pattern in its religious and social environment and uses it to help explain demographic growth. At the end, however, despite this achievement, a nagging question remains: what is gained by describing almost the whole period from the end of antiquity to the Black Death as the first phase of European modernization?

Essentially, Levine wants to contrast the downward flow of power in classical antiquity with the element of contractualism in feudal relations—the dissolution of the latter preparing the path to democracy. Yet to apply the term "modernity" so widely drains it of virtually all meaning, and sets up a contrast between antiquity and the Middle Ages which is far too sharp. Power was not so simply deployed in classical times. The dialogue of petition and response between rulers and cities is just one instance of a "consensual autocracy" that bears many similarities to feudal power relations. Perhaps the story of protomodernization should be either pushed further back in time...