Feudal Society and Its Culture

One of the more ambitious books Progress ever sent abroad, and one of the least polemical: a collaborative world history of the Middle Ages by a group of scholars from Moscow and Leningrad, edited by the medievalist Victor Rutenburg.

Its subject is not a country or a century but a whole epoch taken globally - Western Europe and Byzantium, Russia, the Arab and Iranian lands, North Africa, Ethiopia, pre-Columbian and colonial America, India, China and Japan - each region treated by a specialist, and each treated for its society and its culture together.

That is the distinctive thing about it. The aim was to write the economic history of the medieval world and its art, learning, religion and everyday life as a single story, on a genuinely planetary scale, and the execution is frequently very good. Comparative medieval history of this reach was unusual in any historiography of the period, and remains so.

This is a work of scholarship rather than doctrine, and it should be read as one.

A note on dating: although the imprint is of 1988, nothing of that moment has reached the manuscript. Gorbachev, perestroika and glasnost do not occur, the Twenty-Seventh Congress is absent, and the years 1985 to 1987 do not appear at all. The latest datable reference in some 232,000 words is to 1974, and the historiographical apparatus belongs to the Soviet academy of the 1960s and 1970s.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.