| Abstrakt: |
In the mid-eighteenth century, shorn of their immediate political importance, the Middle Ages acquired a different significance: they became stages in the development of man. Feudalism enabled the medieval world to be presented in a manner peculiarly congenial to the Enlightenment mind, for it could be shown as everywhere similar and governed by the same general causes, and the philosophic historian could fill the gulf between Antiquity and the modern world in a manner congenial to himself and his readers. The identification of the Goths as the originators, or the exponents, of feudalism made possible the supposition that all the European polities had had a similar feudal past and had allowed the history of the feudal scholars to be joined to the Machiavellian and Gothic Traditions. It is unsurprising that the work that did most to ease British writers unto enlightened paths, Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois, had the same duality. Montesquieu's work is not only shot through with ideas of corruption, derived ultimately from Machiavelli, and visibly influenced by Bolingbroke and The Craftsman, but also contains in his account of Frankish history a substantial discussion of the origin of feudalism. Montesquieu's emphasis in his search for laws to enable men to comprehend their experience upon custom and manners, evanescent yet all-powerful, encouraged the opinion that all things were the product of their historical environment. In the medieval case that environment was feudalism. Feudalism had already been deployed as an all-embracing explanation of the history of the English Parliament, and compelled its users into assertions about the nature of Saxon and Norman society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
