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Medieval Society

Conclusion

In this essay we have looked at medieval society from a traditional viewpoint, as a society made up of three orders: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Looking at any of the orders in detail shows that the simple category doesn't capture or even indicate the real complexity of medieval society. For the purposes of our survey course, that's okay. If, however, you want to look more deeply, you need to be aware of other ways of understanding this society.

The economic perspective is one of these other ways. This perspective ranges from traditional Marxist interpretations that look carefully at who controlled the means of production (not the same as looking at those who were rich), to more modern analyses that considered a wide range of factors all playing into economic power.

Sociology and anthropology have had their influence on historical thinking, especially in examinations of persecuted or marginalized social groups. They also have given us ways of analyzing medieval society in terms of sociological categories such as families, solidarities, and other types of communities. Speaking very broadly, these approaches make their main contributions in understanding subsets of society, or that identify hitherto neglected subsets; they haven't done as much in terms of understanding medieval society as a whole.

One thing I'd like you to take away from this introductory essay is that medieval society was complex. It wasn't organized into tiers or a ladder. There was no pyramid. These ways of representing medieval society aren't just misleading, they're plain wrong. The other thing to understand is that "medieval" is a term that covers a thousand years. Almost anything one says about society during that period is going to be right in one place and time, and wrong in another.