Robert F. Berkhofer III - The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950–1350

In the first volume of his monumental study The Sources of Social Power, the sociologist Michael Mann begins with a definition: power is the ability to pursue and attain goals through mastery of ones environment.1 This definition is perfectly sensible, and may be what most historians have in mind when they write in an unselfconscious fashion about power. Unlike Mann, however, most historians of power rarely offer a definition of their ostensible subject. Perhaps as a result, power has become such an all-encompassing concept that its utility as a category of historical analysis has suffered. In a wide range of monographs from the 1980s on, the appearance of the word power in the title serves more as an implicit nod to Foucault than as an accurate indicator of subject matter. At best, it serves to signal a concern with certain subjects that fell out of favor with the rise of the new social history, such as political and institutional history or the history of the nobility (despite the fact that power plays an equally important role in the study of non-elite groups). More recently, power has become a conveniently vague label for more broadly inclusive conferences and book series.2

And why not? If power is seen as present in all social and political relationships, then the study of power is simply the study of history.3 Such a broad view does have the advantage of extending the language of power to a wider array of subjects. As Ludo Milis suggested in Negotiating Secular and Ecclesiastical Power, For far too long, institutional history, legal history, and histoire vnementielle have tried to monopolize power relationships and to encapsulate them in rather narrow explanatory schemes.4 But at a certain point a concept loses coherence. Thomas N. Bisson noted this historiographical problem in his introduction to one of the most useful recent collections about power in the medieval period, Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe: It may not be easy to think of these diverse studies as addressing, let alone defining, a single historical subject. Power seems so conceptually vast, so inscrutably inflated, that one instinctively seeks to pluralize the word; there is editorial perplexity in this books main title.5