La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise
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La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1952, Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region) is a book by Georges Duby.
La société exerted a profound influence on medieval scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the study of medieval feudal society on an entirely new footing. Working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region, charting a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000. Duby argued that in early eleventh century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during the ninth and tenth centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. Duby suggested that this change coincided with a shift in the way people conceived of themselves and their families in the early Middle Ages, moving away from broader notions of kinship towards a more rigid, patrilineal idea of ancestry and primogeniture inheritance. The emergence of this new, decentralized society of dynastic lords could then explain such later eleventh-century phenomena as the Peace of God, the Gregorian reform movement and the Crusades.
Following upon this, Duby formulated a famous theory about the Crusades (which more recent research has since shown to be problematic): that the tremendous response to the idea of holy war against the Muslims can be traced to the desire of disinherited (but well-armed) second and third sons of this French parvenue aristocracy to make their fortunes by venturing abroad and settling in the Levant.
Duby's intensive and rigorous examination of a local society based on archival sources and a broad understanding of the social, environmental and economic bases of daily life became a standard model for medieval historical research in France for decades after the appearance of La société. Throughout the 1970s and 80's, French doctoral students investigated their own corners of medieval France, Italy and Spain in a similar way, hoping to compare and contrast their own results with those of Duby's Mâconnais and its thesis about the transformation of European society at the end of the first millennium.
Although he was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre that came to be known as the Annales School, Duby was in many ways the most visible exponent of the Annaliste tradition, emphasizing the need to place people and their daily lives at the center of historical inquiry.
