History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Average customer rating:

The grandest of grand strategy
Despotism the default state of human governance.
Starts Strong But Quickly Devolves Into Minutia
A series of wars punctuated by brief periods of peace
Difficult but enlightening

The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000
William McNeill
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226561585

Book Description

In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."

"No summary can do justice to McNeill's intricate, encyclopedic treatment. . . . McNeill's erudition is stunning, as he moves easily from European to Chinese and Islamic cultures and from military and technological to socio-economic and political developments. The result is a grand synthesis of sweeping proportions and interdisciplinary character that tells us almost as much about the history of butter as the history of guns. . . . McNeill's larger accomplishment is to remind us that all humankind has a shared past and, particularly with regard to its choice of weapons and warfare, a shared stake in the future."—Stuart Rochester, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. McNeill's comprehensiveness and sensitivity do for the reader what Henry James said that Turgenev's conversation did for him: they suggest 'all sorts of valuable things.' This narrative of rationality applied to irrational purposes and of ingenuity cannibalizing itself is a work of clarity, which delineates mysteries. The greatest of them, to my mind, is why human beings have never learned to cherish their own species."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker

Customer Reviews:

The grandest of grand strategy.......2007-05-24

This is a sweeping history of the interplay between technology, society and war by one of the preeminent historians of our generation. Moreover, it is, in this reviewer's opinion, even more relevant today than it was when first published in 1982.

McNeill, quite naturally, observed the events of the past millennium through the lens of the Cold War and came to the conclusion that the current epoch was wholly unprecedented - weapons so powerful that they made their possessors weak because of their inability to flex any power - and that the global ideological confrontation would continue on as the defining feature of the twenty-first century. To the author's credit, he concludes the volume with these sage words: "But the study of [the] past may reduce the discrepancy between expectation and reality, if only by encouraging us to expect surprises - among them, a breakdown of the pattern of the future suggested in this conclusion."

The near future of 2007 does indeed look a lot different than anyone could have imagined in 1982 - but McNeill's themes are no less germane to the radically altered international environment that we currently find ourselves in. Two bear specific mention and consideration.

First, McNeill emphasizes the power of market forces and the incredibly stimulating effect the early markets of Western Europe had on technological development. By the time he wrote "Pursuit of Power," McNeill had come to see the return of command innovation where technological change is driven by the direction and investment of sprawling state bureaucracies, much as the feudal lords of Medieval Europe controlled military technology. But, if anything, the last quarter-century has witnessed the resurgence of market-driven innovation, mostly spurred on by the Internet and global communication networks, while the Cold War era military industrial complex has shriveled to a shell of its former self in the US and all but evaporated in the states of the former communist bloc. As huge chunks of humanity join the global market for goods and services - most notably China and India, but Brazil and other rapidly developing economies as well - one can and should expect robust growth and innovation around the world to flourish. The hallmark of such a system, as McNeill explains, is the rapid adoption and improvement of anything that works better than the existing model. Only now, rather than having the growth and innovation confined to Western Europe, it will become a much more (but not entirely) global phenomenon.

Second, McNeill sees improvements in transportation as the critical enabler to economic growth in Western Europe. At one point, he anticipates the rise of globalization and outsourcing in commenting on how the sudden growth of steam power threatened the wholesale destruction of British agriculture. Over the course of just a few years in the late 19th century, steam-powered ships became so fast and efficient that it was cheaper to import grain to London from the US, Argentina and even Australia than to raise it on local British farms. Thus, over the course of just a decade, a great number of English farmers were effectively "outsourced." We see the same phenomenon at work today, only it is the rapid efficiency in shipping information owing to cheap and reliable high-bandwidth Internet connections to India and other countries that make a number of American jobs suddenly cost ineffective and thus insecure.

In closing, this is a fantastic book and not just for military history buffs. It says as much about society, organizational methods, international economics, the process of innovation, and how technology shapes worldviews as it does about the impact of new weapons on war.

Despotism the default state of human governance........2006-02-05

Professor McNeill describes this 1982 book as a "footnote" to his famous 1963 The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, and as a companion to his even more famous 1976 Plagues and Peoples. The subject of "The Pursuit of Power" is warfare rather than disease, as in "Plagues and People", but Prof. McNeill's conceptual approach is the same. In fact, in the introduction to this book he describes armed force as "micro-parasitism" of the human race.

This is a densely-written and tremendously erudite book. It has 540 footnotes, all pertinent, in 387 pages. There are 21 very interesting illustrations, including a beautiful etching by Violet le Duc showing the use of the 16th century "trace italienne" in defensive siege warfare, Maurice of Orange's 1607 manual of arms for musketeers, and tank photographs from Heinz Guderian's "Panzer Leader". Every page is filled with interest for the general historian as well as the specialist in military affairs, but it is not light reading.

He elaborates on a few broad themes as drivers of historical change, echoing his previous work: Population growth, the development of markets, and the evolution of military technology. He states: "Indeed all humankind is still reeling from the impact of the democratic and industrial revolutions, triggered so unexpectedly in the last decade of the eighteenth century." He elaborates on these changes as they play out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The last chapter, "The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945" is by far the weakest. He is rather naive in his assessment of Stalin, and curiously equated the Soviet and Western systems under the rubric "command economy". He was myopic about the power of free market behavior in his own time and society, while being quite enthusiastic about it in medieval China.

This leads to a discordant "Conclusion", in which he describes the default political and economic state of the human race as being a despotic command economy. He believed that a "global sovereign power" was the only solution to the threat of nuclear war, the alternative being the "sudden and total annihilation of the human species." I think of the ideal state described by Socrates in Plato's "Republic" as he writes, "Political management, having monopolized the overt organization of armed force, resumed its primacy over human behavior. Self-interest and the pursuit of private profit through buying and selling sank towards the margins of daily life, operating within limits and according to rules laid down by the holders of political-military power. Human society, in short, returned to normal."

Like most who have envisioned a world government, he doesn't describe how such a power could possibly evolve, other than through brute force.

"Even Homer nods", and Prof. McNeill makes a couple of bloopers. He uses the term "hand gun" where most people would use the term "small arms". He attributes the bellicosity of Northern Europeans to their carnivorous eating habits, which required the shedding of much animal blood, and cites the Viking sagas for support, which I think is ridiculous. Plenty of non-Northern Europeans are carnivorous as well as bellicose, and there are plenty of bellicose peoples who eat little or no meat. But these are minor quibbles.

This book is important to everyone with an interest in history, especially the history of warfare. The future may hold some unpleasant surprises for the human species, perhaps including extinction through epidemic disease, nuclear war, or catastrophic climate change. The future is also, however, unknowable and may hold some surprises for us on the upside, despite Prof. McNeill's pessimistic vision.

Highly recommended.

Starts Strong But Quickly Devolves Into Minutia.......2003-12-05

...imho, mcneill's book starts strong, makes cogent points, but then quickly devolves into a morass of minutia...resulting in a tepid ending with no clearly stated thesis, and lukewarm impact all the way around...

...again, imho, it may have been preferable to focus on key developments that changed the course of warfare - with resulting consequences to the victors and the vanquished - then to relate how industry developed as a consequence in a ghoulish sort of 'virtuous-type-spiral', and, finally, to prognosticate where all of this will lead in terms of the final contours of an ultimate 'industrial-war-machine,' with resulting impact internally, externally and environmentally...

A series of wars punctuated by brief periods of peace.......2001-02-25

McNeill shows how military conflict and the advances in technology have stimulated mankind to better itself within the flux of a constantly changing balance of power. "Of War and Men" by Robt O'Connell also addresses this time honored conflict with a focus on culture, weapons technology and warfare.

A good read and an important book for those interested in a longer look at history and how we got here.

Difficult but enlightening.......2000-04-12

A quick warning to anyone who takes up the chore of reading this book. It is quite difficult to get through without serious reflection and time. It is definitely an enlightening book on the course of the world (not just military history) and the last chapter is truly one for discussion.

Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades

Average customer rating:

WELL WRITEN WELL DONE. VERY INFORMATIVE
Very Impressive
Phenomenal - This is a must read
Good book, but there are better ones out there
Knights Templar 201

Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades
John J. Robinson
Manufacturer: M. Evans and Company, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0871316579

Book Description

One of the most magnificent books... putting it down is almost impossible. --Ocala Star-Banner

Customer Reviews:

WELL WRITEN WELL DONE. VERY INFORMATIVE.......2006-07-22

I enjoyed every page of this one. Not being an expert in this field, I certainly cannot vouch for each and every fact the author has given us, but the several facts I did take the time to further research proved the athor correct. The book is well written and in fact is quite a page turner. This is one of those I hated to stop reading and was rather sorry when I had finished it. It is important to understand this past era in order to understand where we are today. The consequences of the actions taken at that time are still being felt even to this day. Highly recommend this one.

Very Impressive.......2006-06-04

I am extremely impressed by the way Robinson conveyed the history of those tumultuous times in such a captivating manner. This work is rich in facts: both large and small, and all interesting. Aside from Templar history, I really appreciated Robinson's ability to clearly explain the major and minor players and the political machinery and machinations of all sides involved (Muslim factions, Hospitallers, Vanetians, the Popes, etc etc). Reading this work is a real learning experience, and Robinson's great writing is far from dry. After reading this book I will surely continue to read Robinson's other works.

Phenomenal - This is a must read .......2006-05-24

Where to start? This is a fantastic piece of work that takes you through the rise and fall of Templars. I would rate it better than Da-vinci code because this is no fiction. It is remarkable that a non-fiction work packs so much action and thrills. This is also the best account of Crusades that I have ever read. In addition, the author also touches upon the personal codes that governed the life of Templars (like the chastity belt, rules against bathing etc). All in all, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested about Crusades or Templars

Good book, but there are better ones out there.......2006-03-05

John Robinson does a very good job in complining information about the Templar and presenting it in an interesting and readable fashion. I thoroughly enjoyed reading more about the Templar (and Robinson does include many details not found in the other Templar books I have read, contrary to those reviewers who claim it is all old material).

What I liked best about this book was its emphasis on context. Robinson does not just give an account of the Templar's doings; he provides an account of all the things which are happening around the Templars as well, which is essential for understanding the Templar.

I also liked Robinson's clear writing style. Some history book get you bogged down with dates and names, but Robinson does an excellent job of tying them together and helping you remember them so that events further into the book will make much more sense.

There are also two complaints I have about this book:

1. There are a number of small, careless mistakes which really should not have been there (i.e. slightly misquoting people, slightly incorrect dates, etc.) and which are rather annoying. As far as I can tell, none of his information is majorly wrong; he just does things like writing that events happened several weeks after another event when it was actually many months, so I guess it's not really a big deal.

2. He seemed rather biased against the Catholic Church. I myself am not Catholic, but even I do not think some of the things that they did were quite as bad as Robinson makes them out to be. For example, his comments to the effect that the charges of homosexuality against the Knights were very probably true because they had vows of chastity are simply underestimating the effect of religion upon people's lives and are just plain stupid. If the Templars couldn't take being chaste anymore, it is not very likely that they would choose to become homosexuals violating the ordinances of the Church rather than simply violating the laws of the Templar.

In conclusion, this was a very good book, but I think that there are better books on the subject out there. I would recommend Stephen Howarth's The Knights Templar. His book is slightly shorter (and thus has a little less detail), but it is also more accurate and is much more fun to read.

Overall grade: B+

Knights Templar 201 .......2005-04-28

Several readers have trashed this book, one saying 'Same old song in a new cover'. That reviewer then goes on to recommend two books written 10 years later.. That's probably why he thought that this was 'old'. While I can't compare this book to anything by Runciman or Tuchman, I will say that this is a pretty good book.

Before you buy this book, please pay attention to the title.. It is called 'Dungeon, Fire, & Sword The Knights Templar IN THE CRUSADES' In order to understand the impact of the KT in the crusades you have to understand the crusades themselves, and in order to understand the crusades, you need to understand the 'players', culture geography etc... The Crusades didn't revolve around the KT, they only played a part, albeit an integral one, in the crusades.

Yes this book is more than just the KT, and no it's not an in depth history of each of the crusades, but it's not supposed to be.. The reader should use this book as a building block about the KT, the crusades and even the Papal State.

What is interesting is that the more one reads about the KT the more you realize that there really is a lot of uncertainty and disagreement surrounding them. In his book, Howarth writes that the master of the Templars was never called the Grand Master, yet that is how Robinson refers to them. There were a few other descrepencies between the two books but nothing major.

The maps (all 3 of them) were ok. The tables of the 'players' in the back of the book were helpful.

I recommend this book.. Could you do better? Maybe, but with all of the junk that they are publishing about the KT these days you could do a heck of a lot worse.

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society)

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A UNIQUE BOOK ON THE ISSUES OF JUDAISM
Fascinating and Eye-Opening
A model of historical scholarship
Were They Different?
Better than a classic?

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
Shaye J. D. Cohen
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520226933

Book Description

In modern times, various Jewish groups have argued whether Jewishness is a function of ethnicity, of nationality, of religion, or of all three. These fundamental conceptions were already in place in antiquity. The peculiar combination of ethnicity, nationality, and religion that would characterize Jewishness through the centuries first took shape in the second century B.C.E. This brilliantly argued, accessible book unravels one of the most complex issues of late antiquity by showing how these elements were understood and applied in the construction of Jewish identity--by Jews, by gentiles, and by the state.
Beginning with the intriguing case of Herod the Great's Jewishness, Cohen moves on to discuss what made or did not make Jewish identity during the period, the question of conversion, the prohibition of intermarriage, matrilineal descent, and the place of the convert in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. His superb study is unique in that it draws on a wide range of sources: Jewish literature written in Greek, classical sources, and rabbinic texts, both ancient and medieval. It also features a detailed discussion of many of the central rabbinic texts dealing with conversion to Judaism.

Customer Reviews:

A UNIQUE BOOK ON THE ISSUES OF JUDAISM.......2003-09-05

Unfortunately, this book did not achieve attention and respect as it appropriately deserves. The author possesses an incredible knowledge on the issues of Judaism In this modern Guide for Perplexed a curious reader could learn all the lattitude of numerous controversies comprising the core of Jewish thought. This as an extraordinary book. I wish the author would present the discoveries he made in a more passionate manner. He deserves such a stance.

Fascinating and Eye-Opening.......2003-08-31

'The Beginnings of Jewishness' seems like it ought to be essential reading for both Christians and Jews who wonder where they came from. In the book, Cohen avoids reading back into the Bible itself and considers a great deal of other historical and literary evidence to determine when being a Jew changed its meaning from 'being from Judea', the geographical location, to 'being a member of the Jewish religion'. He finds the first traces of this in the Hasmonean period, expansions of it in the Roman and up through history. Along the way he is also tracing the beginnings of Rabbinic Judaism after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple, which is quite different from what constituted Judaism before that event. All of this would probably be very surprizing to those who hold anachronistic visions of Jesus as a Rabbinic Jew!. Cohen also goes into quite a bit of detail on matrilineal descent and conversion, maybe more than some would want, but interesting nonetheless. Good book.

A model of historical scholarship.......2002-08-23

I am not a Jew. I bought this book thinking it would explain in good part how the religious culture of the Judeans in the Second Temple period became the enduring religion of a people spread far and wide and how, after the cleansing of Judea, it gave rise to the central documents of that religion, the Mishnah and the Talmud. (What Cohen calls moving from ethnos to ethnoreligion.)

The book actually does little to answer that concern except glancingly. It iscentered on the period I was thinking of (with many extensions later), but the contents are better described by the subtitle, Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, and especially Boundaries. Cohen is a rabbi and a professor of Judaic studies (more accurately a historian of Judaism); quite probably to him my original question was too elementary, and the general answer to it is a given, part of the background from which he speaks. From *his* point of view, the book does contribute seriously to the question of the beginnings of Jewishness. ("Contribute" -- the book is a collection of linked essays on very specific questions, not an overview.) From my original point of view, the book seems totally preoccupied with boundary questions, e.g,, when and how did the Romans stop thinking of Judai as people from Judea, and start looking at them as people sharing a religion, or how did non-Jews become Jews in different periods.

Yet, despite having gone in beyond my depth, I found it impossible to open the book anywhere and not keep on reading, deeply interested. And, as I read on, I realised that the entire book is the best model of historical scholarship, on any topic, that I have ever seen. It could be read with much profit simply for the quality of the work, totally outside any question about Jewishness. If I taught history at the post-graduate level, certainly I would ask my students to spend some hours with the book and then judge by its standard all other scholarly works they will meet.

One of Cohen's qualities is that he is an admirably clear and careful expositor, and that he writes very good prose. (So the book could also be proposed to social science postgrads, though it might push some to drop out.) This is why I got hooked in the first place. But the main quality is in the richness of the footnotes (probably two thirds of the text). When Cohen gets through with a question he has posed, you do not simply have his answer (which may be "I don't know"), but a good dossier of the sources that he thinks bear on the question, with luminous explanations -- always brief, Cohen is anything but a waster of words. Therefore, having followed his travails, you may well incline to a different conclusion. This is a touchstone for true scholarship. This quality of mastering his material and at the same time very candidly sticking to it, extends where Cohen deals with the Christian Fathers or Aquinas. If Cohen is situating and explaining a passage from Aquinas, for instance, you will feel that you are reading a thomistic scholar. (I have to admit, though, that Paul gets under his skin.)

The book is more than worth buying even if you will make heads or tails of no more than a tenth of it. To go beyond this, however, you will need "elementary pre-yeshiva". "Mishnah", "tannaic", etc. are not defined (I had to go to an elementary book first to get up to speed). There is not a single Hebrew character in the book, only transliterations where needed, but obviously a Talmudic student, knowing Hebrew and Aramaic, would get more out of the discussions. Ancient Greek and especially Latin would also be helpful. Of modern languages, Cohen sometimes leaves French untranslated.

Were They Different?.......2001-01-14

Shaye Cohen, using literary criticism, sociological methodology, and history, has effectively demonstrated the evolution of what we call "Judaism." Who or what was a "Jew" is historically a Hellenistic construct developed as part of the Hasmonean regime's (the family behind the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century B.C.E.) attempt to seperate Ioudiaos from Hellene; and what is well documented is the fact that in creating this religio-national group, the Hasmoneans resorted to the same tactics that Alexander imagined in his vision of a "ouranos" centered around Greek culture. Further, and of greater importance to this reader, is the fact that Cohen demonstrates that in the ancient world and late antiquity people generally looked alike (which forces various historical and theological paradigms to be revisited ... particularly in terms of texts used in our high schools and colleges). Another key importance of this analysis lies in the refutation of the sterotypical assumption that Jews somehow looked different and behaved (occupation, interpersonal relations) differently from nonJews in that world. Jews became different, lived apart and worked different occupations only as a result of Roman imperial edict, Church edict, and Medieval European political design. The belief that Jews were different and distinctive emerged as institutional antisemiticism in the 18th and 19th centuries (and reached fruition in the Holocaust) was of political and religious design AFTER the Church became the "official" religion of the state in late antiquity and not a historical fact prior to that occurence.. This book belongs with LATE ANTIQUITY (Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar), THE WORLD OF LATE ANTIQUITY (Brown), CHRISTIANITY & PAGANISM IN THE FOURTH TO EIGHTH CENTURIES (MacMullen), and EMPIRE TO COMMONWEALTH (Fowden). A must for students of late antiquity and the history of religions.

Better than a classic?.......2000-06-21

"This is a gem of a book. Truly a contribution to the history of Judaism. We have waited a long time to discover when Jewishness started and Cohen has laid it out in elegant terms. This surpasses Graetz and Yawetz in erudition and far improves on Maimonides in depth of perception. No doubt lovers of Steinsalz will appreciate this nearly Talmudic tour-de-force."
So says the author about his own book. Buyer beware. Not much of real value here. Just fluff.

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest

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the templars and the grail
Interesting Read
The dramatic story of the Knights Templar
A must-have book on the Templars
Fascinating and evocative yet balanced

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest
Karen Ralls
Manufacturer: Quest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0835608077

Book Description

This definitive work about the Templars and their presumed hidden knowledge addresses many fascinating questions, with rare photos from the Rosslyn Chapel Museum (Scotland) included.

Customer Reviews:

the templars and the grail.......2006-08-03

the book is too especulative not mush scientific information can be obtained.

Interesting Read.......2006-07-02

An Interesting read and a good compliment to
Holy Blood Holy Grail. It could be a bit more
in-depth and a bit less academic.
neat websites.

The dramatic story of the Knights Templar.......2005-06-05

The Knights Templar was a monastic order of Christian warriors that grew out of the medieval campaigns to free Jerusalem and Palestine from the domination of the Muslims in several waves of invasion known collectively as the Crusades. These warrior monks were believed to conduct mystical rites, guard the famed Holy Grail, and possess the lost treasures of Jerusalem. The order's wealth and political activities evolved to provide banking services to kings, act as trusted diplomats, engage in far flung business enterprise, and even work as navigators. The order was ultimately doomed to succumb to political intrigue and the malevolent greed of kings. In The Templars And The Grail: Knights Of The Quest, Oxford-based medieval historian Karen Ralls presents the dramatic story of the Knights Templar, presenting the many beliefs and theories about their presumed powers and arcane knowledge. Drawing upon both popular and academic sources, this impressive, exceptionally well written, and thoroughly accessible history is especially recommended to students of Metaphysical Studies and Medieval History.

A must-have book on the Templars.......2004-08-10

Every now and then a book comes along and you think 'thank God someone has done this!' This book really works on several levels -- firstly, the author is solid and credible, being a professional medieval historian, but also someone who has had previous curator experience at the museum exhibition at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland --a place now known to many more of us, as it is featured in the last chapter of the Da Vinci Code novel. However, this book is a solidly-researched, nonfiction work and a fascinating read on the history of the medieval Order, the Grail, and Rosslyn Chapel, etc. For those who may already have read a bit about the Templars, it still has a lot of intriguing new stuff, yet it's backed up with solid, factual documentation and good references and footnotes-- again, something you often don't see nearly enough in popular books on the Templars. This is not the usual 'one theory book' on the Templars, which I found refreshing to say the least. But it's easy to read and follow overall, and this author doesn't attempt to 'take sides'. A variety of research and views are presented, and then, we, the readers, can take it from there. What seems to be unique here is that this author takes great care to distinguish between fact and speculation -- something in my opinion that is a problem with many of the existing books on the Knights Templars. But although I'd already read some on the Templars and still learned a lot more, a friend of mine who had read nothing at all about them also found this book really intriguing, which says something, too. The photos of the carvings of Rosslyn Chapel were great, and I especially liked the various intriguing bits here and there in each chapter -- like material on the Black Madonna, geometry, St Bernard's role, the medieval origins of traveller's checks, the Jolly Roger pirate flag and medieval Templar naval warfare, various excavations under the Temple Mount, Templar symbolism, and so on. A good resource to have around, and it's not surprising this book is on its fifth printing in a year...it's also easy to 'dip into' when you like. Definitely worth getting.

Fascinating and evocative yet balanced.......2004-02-11

Written by an academic medieval historian, this is one of the best history books on the Knights Templar to come out for some time -- it is balanced (many academic but also some popular sources used, but carefully) and thoughtful, yet still manages to be readable and very intriguing. An ideal combo. The sources are reliable, so this author simply does not need to resort to mere sensationalism, which is so often the case with books on the Templars. The material on Scotland is great, especially the chapter on the enigmatic carvings of Rosslyn Chapel, a place that was also featured in the novel The Da Vinci Code. I would have liked a bit more on medieval Templar naval strategies and warfare and the Jolly Roger, but overall, if you are looking for a solid, reliable book that still has compelling research, admitting that there are still some important unanswered questions about the 'White knights' of the Crusades -- it's a valuable reference book to have around, plus a great read!

History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)

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Check and see
Suprise! Suprise!
Prescient St Augustine?
Something of a disappointment
Romulus courts Helen, Paris founds Rome, Moses goes to Troy..

History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)
Anatoly T Fomenko
Manufacturer: Delamere Resources LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 2913621066

Product Description

`History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2` is the second volume of the most explosive and astounding tractate on history ever written - however, every theory it contains, no matter how unorthodox, is backed by rock solid scientific data. The book is easy and pleasant to read; it is well-illustrated, contains hundreds of charts, graphs and illustrations, copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts attesting to the falsity of the chronology used nowadays. You will be amazed to discover: - That the chronology universally accepted today and taken for granted is simply wrong; - That ALL methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts known today are erroneous or non-exact; - That there is not a single document that could be reliably dated earlier than the XIth century; The Author refers to the Middle Ages as the Antiquity and proves mutual superimposition of the Second and the Third Roman Empire, both of which become identified as the respective kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Furthermore, he asserts that the famous reform of the Occidental Church in the XI century by Pope Gregory Hildebrand was the reflection of the XII century reforms of Byzantine emperor Andronicus who in his turn identifies with Jesus Christ. The Trojan war counted by Homer happened only as late as of the XIII century A.D. and the great poet actually lived in XIV century A.D. No stone in history of Antiquity is left unturned. Literally. This book is the beginning of a major correction to the chronology we live with.

Customer Reviews:

Check and see.......2007-06-21

I don't care what other people say of this book. Those affirmig it's fake, they hadn't ever read it. Or have some special reasons to do so. "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see..." This book won't make you feel comfortable. It'll make you feel free. It'll make you feel you're "not the only one" to feel you'd been lied to for centuries.

Suprise! Suprise!.......2007-03-22

Here is a serie of books which turns "the whole world" upside down. I learned a lot of it and I hope that a new book from A.T. Fomenko will follow very quick. A absolute must for everybody who is interested in history or even a little bit from it.

Prescient St Augustine?.......2006-02-05

We can so far divide the New Chronology into the following three parts:

a) The verifiable theory that proves consensual chronology wrong with the aid of astronomy, statistics and mathematics;

b) The new chronology hypothesis based on a new understanding of known historical facts and the most likely logical explanation of the most obvious inconsistencies inherent in the official version of history;

c) The history conjectures, that is experimental historical reconstructions based on assumptions that the authors believe to make sense in the light of their research and linguistic parallels - void of ironclad factual support to date.

Fomenko's theory complies with the most rigid scientific standards as a whole:

It gives a coherent explanation of what we already know.

- It is consistent: independent lines of inquiry all lead to the same conclusion.

- The predictions it makes are confirmed empirically.

Fomenko goes by the following axioms:

- Chronology is the basis of history;

- Human evolution has always been linear, gradual and irreversible;

- The "cyclic" nature of human civilization is a myth, likewise all the gaps, duplicates, "dark ages" and "renaissances" that we know from consensual history;

- The accumulation of geographical knowledge as reflected in cartography is a gradual and irreversible process;

- The chronological distance between a given manuscript and the events described therein is proportional to the amount of distortions it contains;

- There is no "useless" information in authentic ancient sources.

Why the mainstream historians do not shower mathematician Academician Dr.Prof Fomenko with thanks and laurels?

The Russians:

Because Fomenko asserts that there was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by three centuries of slavery, providing a formidable body of documental evidence to prove his assertion. The so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Arabic spoken as freely as Russian. The ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities. The hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). Their "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions that attempted tax evasion. Fomenko proves that Russian history as we know it today is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scientists brought to Russia by the usurper dynasty of the Romanovs, whose ascension to the throne was the result of coup d'état, charged with the mission of making their reign look legitimate. Fomenko proves Ivan the Terrible to be a collation of four rulers, no less. They represented the two rival dynasties - the legitimate rulers and the ambitious upstarts. The winner took it all! Over some 30 years of controversy, Russian historians have made a most remarkable transition - they were initially accusing the young mathematician Fomenko of anticommunist dissident activity and attempts to deface the historical legacy of Soviet Russia; nowadays the middle-aged mathematician is accused of adhering to "pro-communist Russian nationalism" and defacing the proud historical legacy of Great Russia.

The Westerners:

Because Fomenko blows consensual Russian history to smithereens, successfully removing a crucial cornerstone from underneath the otherwise impeccable edifice of World History. Fomenko adds insult to injury, wiping out one by one the Ancient Rome (the foundation of Rome in Italy is dated to the XIV century A. D.), the Ancient Greece and its numerous poleis, which he identifies as the mediaeval crusader settlements on the territory of Greece, and the Ancient Egypt (the pyramids of Giza become dated to the XI-XV century A. D. and identified as the royal cemetery of the Global "Mongolian" Empire, no less). The civilization of the Ancient Egypt is irrefutably dated to the XII-XV century A. D. with the aid of the ancient Egyptian horoscopes cut in stone. He was the first one to decipher and date all such horoscopes, coming up with mediaeval dates in every case. English historians rage at the suggestion that the history of Ancient England was de facto a Byzantine import transplanted to the English soil by the fugitive Byzantine nobility. To reward the English historians who consider themselves the true scribes of World History, the cover of the present book portrays Tintoretto's Jesus Christ crucified on the Big Ben.

The Chinese:

Because Fomenko wipes out the Ancient History of China outright. No such thing. Full point. The compilation of the so-called Ancient Chinese History is reliably datable to the XVII-XVIII century only. It is perfectly recognizable as the Ancient European history, reworked and transcribed in hieroglyphs as yet another historical transplantation, this time performed on the Chinese soil by the loving Jesuit hands. The Chinese are the next in line to go berserk. Chinese history is inevitably bound to get both more ancient and more eventful, proportionally to the growing involvement of China in the world affairs. Chinese historians will keep on finding valid proof of prehistoric Chinese spaceflights until the Politburo orders them to shut up.

The Arabs:

Too bad. Islam with all its key figures is datable to XV-XVI century A. D. Arabic historians may find consolation in the crucial historical role of the Ottoman Empire in the XVI-XVII century. The trouble is that this empire was initially a Christian state, with Hagia Sophia identifiable as Temple of Solomon, according to Fomenko! We can only guess if the acquisition of Alexander the Great (a Macedonian and a Christian) as the founder of the Muslim World Empire will make Fomenko's theories more acceptable to the Arabic mainstream. He certainly does not spare any holy cows at all, claiming The Stone of Qa'Aba in Mecca to contain the lost Arch of the Covenant.

The Divinity:

Despite of reiterated statement that his theory is all about chronology and not Religion, Fomenko stirs up a whole condominium of wasp nests. His collection of anathemas, fatwa, and other condemnations from all parties concerned is already considerable. Little wonder, considering that the history of religions à la Fomenko looks as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the XI century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (XI-XII century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (XII-XVI century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on.

According to Fomenko we know strictly NOTHING about the events that predate the X century A. D.

St Augustin was prescient when he spoke unto us: "be wary of mathematicians, particularly when they speak the truth."

Something of a disappointment.......2005-09-09

After having read the first volume of this expected series of 7 volumes I was triggered by the thesis of these authors that ancient Greek and Roman history did in fact take place in the Middle Ages. So I started studying medieval history of the Middle East - also known as Islamic history - to find out if the opponents of the ancient Greeks and Romans - the Acheamenid Persians, Sassanids, Scythians, Egyptians, etc. - also have their duplicates in medieval history. My search was disappointing: none of the many medieval Islamic dynasties seemed to correspond to the ancient middle eastern rulers.

However, I did find a close correspondence between Herodotus' Persian kings and medieval events:

- the defeat and capture of an Anatolian king - the Lydian Croesus - by the Persian conqueror Cyrus is identical to the defeat and capture of another Anatolian king - sultan Bayezid - by the Asian/Mongol conqueror Tamerlane;
- the Persian conquest of Egypt by the cruel tyrant Cambyses reds almost exactly as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt by Selim the Grim (note the nickname!);
- Darius the Lawgiver of the Persian Empire looks very much alike to Sulayman the Magnificent, the Lawgiver in Islamic history;
- Xerxes, whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by the Greeks at the naval battle of Salamis, looks like Selim II (the Sot) whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by a Spanish-Italian alliance at the naval battle of Lepanto.

I should have expected Fomenko et al. to arrive at similar conclusions, however, they claim that the Persian kings are the alter egos of the Angevin kings of Sicily whose biographies do not contain the exploits of the Persian kings.

The similiarities I indicate lead to the conclusion that Herodotus must have written his Histories at the close of the 16th century. But this is extremely late, given that Herodotus is "the Father of History", so therefore all other "ancient" histories must have been fabricated even later. Yet, the founders of modern chronology - Scaliger and Petavius - laid their foundations also at the close of the 16th century and had the full corpus of ancient histories already at their disposal.

It seems to me that Fomenko has to address these inconsistencies, maybe in the forthcoming 5 volumes?

Another critique of their book is that the correspondencies between different rulers are often based on a superficial comparison of the biographies; upon a more thorough comparison many details appear that do not correspond at all.

Finally, the authors rely heavily on the works of Gregorovius (1821-1891!!) - his medieval histories of Rome and Athens - as the source of medieval history; these works are - at least in the West - hoplessly outdated and have been superceded by more up-to-date works (for instance, Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantine history is not even cited).

Romulus courts Helen, Paris founds Rome, Moses goes to Troy.........2005-07-30

If you agree with Fomenko that Roman chronology is basically the foundation of the entire edifice of global chronology; you would also certainly agree that despite its numerous gaps and inconsistencies, Roman history is the best-documented field of ancient history, and thus a reference scale. But how well is the actual date of the Eternal City's foundation known?

Firstly, Rome is supposed to have been founded by the Trojans who had to flee after the fall of Troy. Some claim Rome to have been founded by Aeneas and Ulysses shortly after Troy had fallen; others are of the opinion that there was an entire dynasty that ruled for 500 years between the fall of Troy and the foundation of Rome.

Well, that's just an innocent 500 years long misunderstanding compared with what heretic Fomenko says, asserts, proves in his second volume: Second Roman Empire, Third Roman Empire, Biblical Kingdom of Israel, Biblical Kingdom of Judah, Holy Roman Empire are stories about basically same events, written from different points of view at different times. The underlying events have actually taken place during xii-xv cy. These histories have been written and perfected by multitude of highly talented humanist and clerical writers of xiii-xvi cy disguised as "ancients" with glorious names like Homer, Pluto, Thucydides etc..Chronology 2.0 beta..

Historians are kindly invited to report the bugs.

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The Great Stirrup Controversy
A great work that connects technological and social history
Old But Not Out of Date
Relevant, not outdated
Old and Out Dated

Medieval Technology and Social Change
Lynn White
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195002660

Amazon.com

In Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White considers the effects of technological innovation on the societies of medieval Europe: the slow collapse of feudalism with the development of machines and tools that introduced factories in place of cottage industries, and the development of the manorial system with the introduction of new kinds of plows and new methods of crop rotation. One invention of particular import, writes White, was the stirrup, which in turn introduced heavy, long-range cavalry to the medieval battlefield. The development thus escalated small-scale conflict to "shock combat." Cannons and flamethrowers followed, as did more peaceful inventions, such as watermills and reapers.

Book Description

This study examines the role of technological innovation during the rise of social groups in the Middle Ages.

Customer Reviews:

The Great Stirrup Controversy.......2003-12-13

Halsall gets it wrong. The great controversy is still going on about feudalism as a system arising from a technological innovation, the stirrup.

White's details about the stirrup and change of warfare are partly insufficient and conclusions partly dubious. - But this is exactly, why we read history. The causes of events tend to be very complicated. Luckily there is Trivial Pursuit and other parlour games for people, who prefer "facts".

This book is seminal.

A great work that connects technological and social history.......2002-11-02

This is one of the classic works of medieval studies to emerge out of the past half century, and its importance far outstrips whether or not White's famous stirrup thesis is correct or not. The overwhelming consensus is that it is incorrect. But only someone who has not read the book could imagine that that thesis was the bulk of the book, or the only idea in it. In fact, there is an unstated, larger thesis that underlies White's book, and which indicates why it is important: White implies that we can only understand the medieval period if we also understand its technology. White virtually ushered in the age of the study of medieval technology and seeing it as intimately connected and underlying the social and even political history.

This is a short book, shorter than it initially seems upon holding it because of the vast number of foot and endnotes. But the number of ideas and insights are completely out of proportion with the book's apparent brevity. It is absolutely stuffed to overflowing with content. Miraculously, that doesn't effect its readability. Even a relative neophyte to historical studies will have little difficulty following White's ideas and arguments, although, obviously, the more one knows, the better the background one will have for understanding his theses.

Although his stirrup thesis has largely been rejected, this remains an essential book on any short list of the great works of medieval history. More than that, it is fun, too. I strongly recommend it to anyone with the slightest degree of interest in medieval history.

Old But Not Out of Date.......2002-10-14

Medieval Technology and Social Change was published in 1962. It is the production of a professor and it bears many of the characteristics of such works: huge numbers of footnotes, further Notes at the end (comprising about a third of the total book), and an extremely scholarly tone. Fortunately Professor White writes much better than many academics, and the book contains a number of interesting speculations about the effect of Europe of the technological changes which took place in the Middle Ages.

The book concentrates almost completely on Europe, so that you will have to look elsewhere for technological changes in the rest of the world, but what is here is fascinating. There is speculation on the role of the stirrup in revolutionizing warfare and feudalism, an examination of the effects of the three field system on the health of the medieval Europeans, and some intriquing hypotheses on the development of various power sources and machine designs. Worthwhile, particularly in combination with a broader work such as Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey.

Relevant, not outdated.......2002-09-27

This book was part of the PhD curriculim at a top-tier university for Public Policy. The course was Science & Technology Policy I (a massive literature review before getting into our own research).

Whether or not the chain of events and relationships occurred precisely as White postulates is irrelevant.

The POINT is that small, technological change can have GIANT impacts upon life and social organization. This has been proven repeatedly by the researchers/students of complexity science (see Mitchell Waldrop, Murray Gell-Mann, Roger Lewin, John Holland, etc.)

By connecting medieval technological change (eg agrarian practices, stirrup, clock) to societal change (eg feudal system, settlement/town patterns), this book provides readers with a conceptual starting point to begin thinking about the impact of modern and future technologies.

In short, its a quick, VERY stimulating and interesting read. With the price at only 2 dollars, you can't go wrong!

Old and Out Dated.......2002-06-13

White's "stirrup" thesis was shown to be incorrect by Bernard Bachrach over 30 years ago. It was an interesting hypothesis at the time, but now has become one of those ideas (such as medieval people thinking the world was flat) that half-educated school teachers tell students and that even gets into the less well-edited textbooks.

In other words, read this book if you are interested in the history of ideas, but not for conclusions any professional medieval specialist would accept.

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A review by a non-historian

The Evolution of Feudalism

Ian Myles Slater on: A Modern Classic, Not Yet Out-Moded

Feudalism as a social type

On the top ten list for medieval studies

Feudal Society, Volume 2: Social Classes and Political Organization
Marc Bloch
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Making of the Middle Ages

Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade

Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe

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On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classic Editions)

ASIN: 0226059790

Book Description

"Few have set themselves to the formidable task of reconstructing and analyzing a whole human environment; fewer still have succeeded. Bloch dared to do this and was successful; therein lies the enduring achievement of Feudal Society."—Charles Garside, Yale Review

Customer Reviews:

A review by a non-historian.......2006-12-03

I read this book for a contemporary historiography class. As has been told by other reviewers, Marc Bloch is the founder (together with Lucien Febvre) of the Annales school. As a non-historian, I won't comment on its importance for historiography, but as a very valuable read for non-historians who want to understand the history of Western civilization reading the best books that have been written on the subject. This is my first book on the middle-ages and, although it took me quite a while to finish it (about a month) and it is definitively not an easy read, since it is an extraordinarily erudite work, it is a very worthwhile read. It provides a fairly good picture of how the feudal society developed after the Hungarian, Muslim, and Scandinavian invasions, which allowed it to flourish. I would point out two basic concepts that were of particular interest to me (although not explicit in the text). First, the concept of sovereignty. It is particularly interesting visually, since land was divided among an infinite number of lords as a bottom-up chain starting from the lowest peasant through the prince or monarch. So land belonged to everyone and to no one at the same time. This is a very original idea of sovereignty, rather opposite to modern sovereignty. The second concept is that of the "hommage", which I would call contract. The hommage between serf and lord was not that of subordination entirely, but it was neither that of equals--such as the contracts of the bourgoisie were, that we can trace back to the XIIth century, and personally I was moved by Bloch's analyses of this first contract among equals--, and it was originally voluntary. According to Bloch, this hommage influenced many other contracts we know of, namely marriage, courtois love, and even representative parliamentary governments.
To conclude with, I would say that my historiography teacher told me this is the best work on the middle-ages, so I decided to read it, and it wasn't easy, it took me a while, but it was very rewarding. I don't recommend it for people who don't read a lot, but if you enjoy history and want to know what the feudal society was all about, this is a very rewading book as an introduction to the middle-ages. I strongly recommend it.

The Evolution of Feudalism.......2005-06-02

Certainly an undeniable classic in the field of "history of the middle ages". As other reviewers have already noted, Bloch was one of the initial members of what grew to become the "annales" school of western history, though, to be fair, he died before you could call it a "school" or "movement".

Volume one of the two volume set looks at the growth of feudalism in western society, and by western I'm talking about Northern France, Western Germany, England and Northern Italy. Bloch's main concern in this volume is setting the conditions which led to the developmen of feudalism from 800 AD to 1000 AD and then describing the various forms that feudalism took.

The book is well translated, and I found it hard to argue with much of the thesis. I too have read Norman Cantor's "the Making of the Middle Ages" where he calls Bloch a Marxist (and maligns the entire Annales school). I've also read more recent productions from the Annales school. I have to say, based on this particular book, I don't really see where Bloch is a)romanticizing the peasant (another Cantor criticism) or b) a marxist.

It seemed to me that Bloch's explanation for the growth of feudalism was, basically, that central government decayed to the point where various muck a mucks needed to find an alternative way to "rally the troops" in the face of frequent small to mid size invasions. Feudalism, with its emphasis on individual obligation and quid pro pro, was an attempt to remedy the lack of communication over long distances and lack of central authority.

The peasants didn't really figure in this book at all, except near the end. Certainly, one wouldn't accuse this book of being filled with marxist/post-modern/decontructionist gobbeldy gook. This is a must read for those interested in the field, especially lay men.

Ian Myles Slater on: A Modern Classic, Not Yet Out-Moded.......2005-01-28

I suppose I should be of two minds about Marc Bloch's "Feudal Society," a French work from the late 1930s which became available in English in the early 1960s, and was still fresh and exciting back when I was taking a freshman course on "Western Civilization." In theory, the book (and it is one book, although published in paperback in two volumes) has two major drawbacks. In practice, I find it solid, admirable, and well worth reading.

One drawback is the author's romantic glorification of the medieval peasant -- Norman Cantor has called attention to this in his "Inventing the Middle Ages," pointing out that Bloch gave it Marxist trappings. I call it romantic because I suspect that Bloch owed at least as much to Jules Michelet's nineteenth-century historiography, initially with a veneer of "science" added. Of course, Bloch actually went out and did fundamental work in the archives, and tried to get a real picture of how, in the long term, life had been lived by ordinary people, instead of relying on Michelet-style suppositions. (Yes, Bloch's "Annales" school is supposed to be the antithesis of the enthusiastic Michelet; but, while Bloch established its methodology in reaction to existing approaches, in Bloch's last book "The Historian's Craft," Michelet is still among "our great forebears.")

The second is the concept of "Feudalism" itself, which these days makes anyone with a serious background in medieval studies very uncomfortable. A very good case can be made that "Feudalism" is largely a set of modern constructs, re-invented several times since the sixteenth century to suit different legal, political, and social purposes, and presented as an "Historic Fact" alongside contemporary and later "discoveries" such as "Anglo-Saxon Liberty," "The Norman Yoke," and "Our Ancestors the Gauls." (A short, pointed, introduction to one aspect of the problem is J.G.A. Pocock's "The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century.")

If it means anything for modern-day historians, the term applies to how control of land, and its revenue, was linked to social status, political authority, judicial functions, and reciprocal military obligations -- a large, messy, topic. So the feeling is growing that the word is best avoided, as carrying too much baggage, and too likely to be invoked as a substitute for thought.

Indeed, as picked up by Karl Marx, Feudalism, equated largely with landlord-tenant agriculture instead of sub-divided political and judicial authority, became a theoretical concept to be applied to a variety of extra-European societies, as a stage in an inevitable social evolution. In this role, it produced, or at least became a part of, bitter, and literally murderous, disputes over the nature of Russian and Chinese society, among others.

Even with all this in mind, and many years after first reading it, I find Bloch's emphasis on the material basis of medieval society refreshing, and think that he carried it out with reasonable consistency. Whatever his agenda, he went looking for real data, and adjusted theory to match it, which is where he parts company with both Michelet and Marx. That later work has revealed a more complex, and in some ways different, picture does not discredit his effort. And having the hardworking peasant as a sort of collective hero helps hold together discussions of things like field rotation, strip cultivation, and plough-teams, which most readers will not find all that gripping on their own.

More important, in some ways, Bloch presented feudal *society* -- not some imaginary entity called "Feudalism" or "The Feudal System" -- as a whole set of ways of ordering people and institutions, and making resources available to various parts of a diversified ruling class. The unsystematic nature of actuality is not denied, but it is classified in terms of common elements.

This getting down to practical realities may not sound so impressive, but a couple of generations of scholars had been smacking each other over the head (in this case, figuratively) in an argument of whether "Feudalism" was *really* Roman or Germanic, with partisan sub-divisions on whether either origin was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Somehow, figuring out how it worked had seemed less important than what Mircea Eliade called "The Prestige of Origins" -- a form of mythical thought as much as a topic of historical research.

So instead of a broad theory of a single "origin," we get "The Growth of Ties of Dependence" (volume one of the paperback edition), followed by "Social Classes and Political Organization," showing the extent to which the pattern of rural hierarchies did, or did not, carry over into "higher" or "more advanced" developments.

Although probably much more accurate for France than for other parts of Europe, and for some centuries more than others, the book does manage to present a (by and large) convincing picture of how Europe re-organized itself between the collapse of Rome and the High Middle Ages. A reminder of the people who made it all possible, but were usually left out of the chronicles, and certainly are missing from most of the chansons de geste and romances, is not a bad basis for a book.

Still, largely for reasons of documentation, Bloch is sometimes rather better at explaining how the military aristocracy was supported, than at presenting the daily lives of the people who were doing the work. His analysis of how some knights and officials had "fiefs" which were simply stipends, or even what we might consider cafeteria privileges, is an interesting sidelight to "life on a medieval manor" approaches. It also reveals that methods of supporting the clergy and the nobility were not all that different, which shouldn't be a big surprise, given the limited options available.