Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (review)

By using the terms 'periodisation', 'feudalism' and 'secularisation', Kathleen Davis engages in an examination of three highly contentious terms. Add ideas around colonialism, postcolonialism, and a hint of nationalism, and we have a work that is both theoretically ambitious and academically challenging. The text is certainly not for the faint-hearted scholar, requiring careful and attentive reading in order to grasp the full import of Davis' argument: the idea that there is a strong relationship between the structure of the 'Middle Ages' and the history of sovereignty, colonialism and slavery. Davis challenges the rigid medieval/ modern periodisation that permeates historical and theoretical scholarship. By periodisation, Davis means 'a complex process of conceptualizing categories, which are posited as homogenous and retroactively validated by the designation of a period divide' (p. 3). Davis asks 'Where is the Now?' suggesting that categories deemed medieval cannot be relegated to a distant and barbaric past because they are still relevant to political categories today. Feudalism and secularisation still exist, undermining the argument that they anchor the Middle Ages as a period concept and supply the narrative bases of the 'modern' sovereign state and secular politics. History should not be erased or manipulated to fit a rigid timeline, just as the future cannot be predetermined. To ensure this, Davis suggests that 'periodisation must come undone' (p. 134).

The text is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 examines the continental debates of feudalism and secularisation in order to establish why, and how, they became temporal power categories. Davis suggests that the feudalism of Europe's past is based in legal battles over sovereignty. Secularisation appeared in relation to feudalism through sovereignty and is therefore the key to historical debates over periodisation. By examining the feudal narrative through the work of sixteenth century legists, Davis shows how their work grounded arguments regarding the 'free' political subject and a social contract, while submerging the problem of slavery into the barbaric past (p. 8). The rise of colonialism and its associated slave trade pushed feudal law and its associated slavery onto a non-European present thus erasing any barbaric history associated with the coloniser. The legists' narratives justified historical and geographical claims to sovereignty and tried to deal with competing definitions of sovereignty and subjection, slavery and freedom culminating in contradictory narratives which were important in the development and process of periodisation.

According to Davis, Chapter 1 does not advance the reader's knowledge regarding why periodisation occurred or why 'it is so difficult to establish beginning and end points for "the Middle Ages"' (p. 9). This segues nicely into Chapter 2 which takes further steps towards an answer. Davis looks to seventeenth-century English scholars interested in sovereignty, conquest and absolutism, and their 'discovery' of a feudal English past. Using the works of Henry Spelman and John Selden, the author shows how the English feudal narrative developed in and around a colonial discourse. Turning to eighteenth-century feudal narratives and colonial India, Davis continues with the work of William Blackstone, based on a series of triangular connections between an English feudal past, the contemporary policy of the East India Company, and the relationship, albeit controversial, between commerce and conquest. Davis concludes that the history of feudalism 'is not to be found in "the Middle Ages" but in the complex and shifting series of triangulations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' (p. 10).

Chapter 3 uses the works of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, to explore the role(s) time, religion and the secular play in relation to sovereignty. Davis argues that the 'theoretical underpinnings of the relation of periodisation as a theory of history to political sovereignty' and the reactions to that theory outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 show a 'disruption of the medieval/modern, sacred/ secular divide' (p. 78). Chapter 4 takes the reader back to the...