Abstract
Abstract: In this essay I turn the late Timothy Reuter’s classic articulation of the ‘medieval’ as a pragmatic concept with relevance only to regionally defined scholarly communities on its head. I propose that the utility of medieval worlds or the Global Middle Ages could lie in the fact that these concepts need not posit a particular ‘stage of development’ or ‘social formation’ as the conceptual protocol for comparison. Their fluidity is what makes these periodizations meaningful for world and global history. I will first outline how fluidity can be productive in rethinking temporal, spatial, disciplinary, geopolitical, and object-related boundaries in the practice of history. I will conclude with some brief observations about the affordances of in-betweenness in positioning “Middle Period History” in and beyond academia.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 142-147 |
| Journal | Early Medieval China |
| Volume | 30 |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Keywords
- Medieval history
- Global history
- Chinese history
- Global Middle Ages