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

6. RECOMBINANT MUTATIONS

401 6 Recombinant Mutations After the year 1000, during the first phase of early modernization, there had been a coincidental congealment of new state formations, new class relations , new modes of spatial and temporal organization, new technologies of power, new productive forces, new representations of the self, new demographic relations, and new family formations. What I have been describing is the operation of a positive feedback system in which the whole became rather more than the sum of its parts. It led to a “release of energy and creativity [that was] analogous to a process of nuclear fission.”1 Much of this energy resulted in extensive gains. I have also taken pains to indicate the intensive character of advance, pointing the way to a future wholly different from the human past in terms of mastery over the material world. 1. The population density of Europe—especially the northwestern region— in 1300 was very substantially higher than it had been ten generations earlier , when the long cycle of growth began to take its first halting steps. Indeed, after the year 1000 the traditional social order of early modern Europe took shape as a complex, articulated network of towns, villages, and parishes. However much we want to draw attention to its organizational innovations, it is crucial to keep in mind the fact that early modern society, in common with its ancient predecessor, was based on an organic energy economy which created limits to growth. The division of social power developed on the model of a zero-sum game so that rapid population always 1. Peter Brown,“Society and the Supernatural:A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104 (1975): 134. For an appreciation of this specific point, see Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought (London, 1984), 62. pushed the marginal elements in the population downward. There were two ways in which this inexorable process of social descent could be forestalled : either colonization could extend the landed endowment, or subdivision and a more efficient division of labor could lead to higher productivity . Both of these strategies were deployed after the year 1000. The massive energy generated by these forces was only partially encapsulated within the strong stem family presided over by the peasant patriarch . It is crucial to recognize that these centrifugal forces were socially creative . Not the least important aspect of this creative power was the nonlinear demographic response to marginalization and downward social mobility that continuously pushed the frontiers of material life outward— both quantitatively in the form of magnifying the land mass and qualitatively in terms of more intensive modes of production and exchange. The early modernization of material life was accompanied by three centuries of population growth and radical changes in economic life. This major reorganization of social life provided the essential context within which ten generations of Europeans would be born, marry, form families, and die. The peasant family’s reproduction provided the driving force of this expansion . At the heart of this process was the growth of the peasant labor force, which, freed from the institutional constraints of slavery and liberated from the ecological harness of late antiquity, reproduced itself vigorously . But rather than having recourse to the image of the unimodal peasant family, I have chosen to stress the contradictions emerging from the interplay between the patriarchal system’s centripetal forces of upward wealth flows and the centrifugal forces of marginalization that involved all those who were not older, propertied males. Although most of the population lived on the land, lateral growth was leaving its mark as a new infrastructure of economic life—cities, markets, roads, exchange networks, and production routines—developed. Social relations and cultural identities, too, were changing; perhaps the most remarkable aspect was in the creation of an infraculture of internalized discipline which had developed alongside the clerics’ sedulous quest for uniformity. The Church’s monopoly rights to moral legitimacy were not granted; they were won. Its claims were challenged whenever and wherever the clergy’s own technologies of power were turned against them.The success of the Gregorian Reformation created its own contradictions, the foremost of which was the tension between the professional clergy’s will to power and the laity’s popular demand for moral legitimacy. The pestilential fury unleashed by the Black Death created a different environment in which novel forms of social organization flourished. Its 402 / Recombinant Mutations impact was like a determination event...