World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 11: The High Middle Ages

Wed, Nov 20, 2013

24. Thu, Nov 21, 2013

Chapter 11 is if anything more scatter-shot and schizophrenic than the rest of the book so far. It's a grab-bag of ill-sorted facts, with little apparent effort to put various pieces of the problem into context.

From the rubble we can probaby extract a few useful themes: in particular, one important one is the formation of the nation-state as a distinct entity. We are inclined to take the idea of the nation-state very much for granted these days, but it has not always been so. The Greek city-states were not national in the same sense; the Roman Empire was trans-national. What is the value, if any, of having a state in which there is an apparent correspondence between ethnicity and language (the defining characteristics of a nation in the older sense of the term) on the one hand, and political hegemony on the other? The later Middle Ages show some distinct phases in the process of nation formation, and the paths taken in one part of Europe did not necessarily work in others. Each location had its peculiar issues with population and tribal makeup to reconcile (or not). England, for example, reconciled a French-speaking ruling class with a larger English-speaking substrate population; the process took from 1066 to about 1300. Spain established its national characteristics during the Reconquista by excluding previously dynamic portions of its population — particularly the Jews and the Moors.

• The coalescence of the nation-state in several places: England, France, and Spain, in particular. What political forms attended these?
• The nation-states that never quite came together (at least during the Middle Ages): Germany and Italy. What are the differences here?
• The Papacy as a player in this overall dynamic of power.

Contents of this page © Copyright 2011, 2012 by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.