mariness

After reading the last bit, I went back and skimmed through the rest of the liveblogging on the debate on Texas educational standards. Here's the next bit that jumped out at me:

We just got a look at four amendments board member Barbara Cargill will propose. Students would be expected to “explain three pro-free market factors contributing to European technological progress during the rise and decline of the medieval system” (what three factors?);

Look, I know I seem to complain about this a lot, but it's because the concept doesn't seem to be getting through: when we use the word "medieval," we are talking about an approximately 1000 year period of history (depending upon when you define the beginning and the end, traditionally the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 456 to either the fall of Constantinople (1453) or the printing press (1450) or the death of Richard III/beginning of the Tudor dynasty (1485) or the fall of Grenada (1492) or any of a number of other dates; I can assure you that you can easily find historians who will disagree with me, and many historians prefer to date the end of the medieval period somewhat earlier, at the Black Death (1348-1350), because of the tremendous economic and social upheavals that followed that pandemic.

In one thousand years and several countries and several cultures and various people traipsing around everywhere (the medievals traveled far more than we tend to give them credit for; several people hopped on the crusade bandwagon for a reason), not to mention varying levels of technology, we, not surprisingly, find significant diversity in economic systems. Yes, at various places (England, France) and various times (a fairly limited period) feudalism was the In Thing, a system that would later appear in other cultures, not to "leave" until Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861, a move, I might add, that was not done for the sake of the serfs. But feudalism was by no means universal in medieval Europe at any time, and even places that used the system showed significant local variations.

Tolkien does an excellent job of showing how this worked in The Lord of the Rings, showing how different, somewhat but not completely isolated cultures, used completely different economic systems, an image he took from his extensive studies of Scandinavian economic systems interacting with British economic systems still interacting with old Roman and current Byzantine systems. It's a more enjoyable way of understanding the system without going through a lot of medieval economic textbooks.