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Bonus Ep 9: The Great Stirrup Controversy
🕑 Added 2021-10-28 13:58:17 +0000 UTChello patrons! thank you once again for subscribing. your second patron-exclusive episode for October is our much-delayed discussion of the Great Stirrup Controversy, which argues that feudalism, vassalage, and serfdom are all the result of the invention of the stirrup and its adoption by the Frankish king Charles Martel. we also touch on technological determinism and why technology isn't the end-all, be-all mover of humanity.
we're currently at 165 of 175 subscribers needed to hit our next stretch goal and open up a Discord server. so close!
also, if you have ideas you'd like us to discuss for the next patron-exclusive episodes, then leave them in the comments below or feel free to talk about this episode or our recent free episodes on historical materialism.
thanks again!
Comments
I'm loving the episodes about historical materialism. As someone who teaches both Marx and Weber in my theory classes, I've wondered a lot about the development of capitalism and how, exactly it differed from feudalism, so I'm really enjoying hearing about this from a medievalist's perspective! One question that I've been thinking about a lot lately is colonization and the creation of racial categories. We often discuss colonization as something that developed in the early modern period, why is that? Obviously people had been conquering others long before that, so why did colonialism in particular develop and what sets it apart from previous ways of interacting with the "other"?
Heather
Regarding 'primitive communism', I'm curious what you think of evidence that agriculture was at various points abandoned and how this complicates the linear narrative many of us have about social/technological progress. Like in Britain during the period Stonehenge was in use, where it looks like they stopped cereal farming and went back to gathering hazelnuts, but carried on keeping pigs and cows.
