Feudal Society
A two-volume study of European feudalism from roughly the ninth to the thirteenth century, written by the co-founder of the Annales school, treating feudalism not as a legal system but as a whole social world: bonds of dependence, nobility, kinship, mentalities, and political order. Published in French as La Société féodale (vol. 1 in 1939, vol. 2 in 1940) and translated into English by L. A. Manyon in 1961.
Five hundred and seventy pages built on a concept its own field has since taken apart. Bloch stretches feudalism until, one reader judges, it ends up "so dilute as to be quackery or homoeopathy depending on your level of personal sourness," and the scholarship caught up with the sourness: even the book's admirers now concede of the feudal frame that "we now think that this is not very helpful." Getting through it is its own problem. "Bloch's work is relentlessly analytical rather than narrative in nature," writes a historian who taught from it, "I learned much but there was even more that I didn't absorb" (a professional, remember). "I would not necessarily recommend it to someone who is not thoroughly invested in medieval studies."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
