Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
17 - King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
Summary
In this paper, I do not use the terms of my title, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, in their original, strict sense. Strictly speaking, the ‘base’ would mean the sum-total of all economic relations in the society of the Ottonian age, while ‘superstructure’ would mean the sum of all other social phenomena which ultimately depended on the ‘base’. Instead, I use the terms here as a convenient shorthand for the vast bulk of the population, on the one hand, and a tiny elite group, on the other. This shorthand has the advantage of acting as a constant reminder that the elite lived very largely off the (mostly agrarian) production of the other group. There are good reasons why these social and economic aspects of the Ottonian period are seldom acknowledged in modern scholarship: as we shall see, our secure knowledge of the ‘base’, that is, of the specifically Ottonian part in the economic and social development of the Reich in the early Middle Ages, is fairly small, and can hardly be expected to increase much. All the same, the relationship between base and superstructure remains interesting, problematic and neglected. The question of what this relationship was like looks all the more urgent when we consider the more recent historiography of the Ottonian period in a comparative European perspective. What were the broad lines of development in the European tenth century?
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- Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities , pp. 300 - 324Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006