Understanding feudal issues in the Czech and non-Czech literature from the perspective of historiographical discourse

Similar to other historical phenomena, understanding feudal issues has always been closely related to the changes of historiographical discourse. In the nineteenth century, the institution of fief was treated as a component of feudalism and as such fairly negatively valued, whilst when in later literature, popular became a notion of feudal law, a kind of a legal system, its importance was highly overrated. Examined within the framework of legal history, the issue of fiefdom gained independence with the advent of processuality of the historical process in historical sciences, e.g., in the form of influence of sociology in the monograph from the late 1920s La société féodale by Marc Bloch, who saw elements similar to feudalism and feudal institutions in areas outside Europe. Positive assessment of the feudal system emerged in the context of the formation of territorial structures of the state, mainly due to the German scholar of history of law – Heinrich Mitteis. Further impulses, largely referring to older ideas, occurred together with the problematisation of some institutions formerly deemed immutable, such as feudalism, as well as the recognition of the feudal system as an independent social structure, not subject to the influence of historical factors and processes, e.g., in the 1953 monograph of Georges Duby La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise. Some shortcomings of the structural perspective were overcome by a more flexible interpretation of the phenomena in the spirit of the postmodern discourse, e.g., through studies on vassals. The postmodern critique inspired the work of Susan Reynolds (Fiefs and Vasalls), who in addition to the use of traditional concepts, undermined the continuity of the historical process, or our understanding of the continuity of the historical process in accordance with Neo-Kantian philosophy. The Czech historiography, naturally, went through analogous processes, the change best attested to in the 1952 paper Lennie právo v Čechách by František Graus, who, within the Marxist discourse on the periodisation of history, applied the structural approach to the problems of feudal system, yet, as regards the title of the said article, still remained within the former discourse.