Some research projects just don’t pan out. I’m going to tell you about one of mine.
Several years ago, for a course on the High Middle Ages, I decided to study primogeniture—the custom of handing property and titles down to the elder son (if there is a son). Primogeniture expanded across Europe in the Middle Ages. In many cases it replaced partible inheritance, in which property was divided among offspring, with daughters sometimes included.
The American university system is remarkably durable, even though Its failings are clearly visible. Colleges and universities roll on, with the only sign of weakness a so-far modest decline in attendance. This is in spite of mounting costs; scandals like admission bribing and cheating; equally scandalous student debt; high drop-out rates; grade inflation; etc.
In February 2018, I wrote an article about whether universities will face a “crackup” or if they have the stability to keep going as they have. I proposed that we might learn something from other institutions that persist over time, such as the European Catholic Church, especially in the medieval period (500-1500). (This was not an original idea but I haven’t seen it developed by others.)
Like universities, the Catholic Church was a complex body with many components. While it had a single head, the pope, it also had parish churches, charitable hospitals, cathedral schools, monasteries, convents, and bishoprics, all scattered widely geographically, as are our universities and their components.
Historians and economists think differently. Historians tend to be self-effacing and tentative; economists are bold.
Let me illustrate this by a statement from a historian introducing a more scientific way of looking at the Black Death:”The new microbiology . . .opens up entirely new questions, ones we did not previously know we needed to ask.”[1]
Notice: . . . opens up entirely new questions . . . not answers.
The following statement is from two path-breaking economists. “This book explains that unique historical achievement, the rise of the Western World.”[2]
I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England and Greenland was temporarily settled.)
One thing I learned was that our romantic “Sir Walter Scott” fantasies about knights, castles, chivalry, and jousts are—largely true! There really was a courtly world. Lords built scores (perhaps hundreds) of castles across western Europe; the move to primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born male) meant that a lot of younger sons (“cadets”) were looking for rich heiresses; and jousts were a way of keeping young knights busy and in good shape without actually engaging in wars (of course, they had plenty of those, too). The aristocrats may have represented only 2 percent or so of the population, but they had chroniclers and poets to commemorate them.
