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Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.

So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!

It has dominated academic and popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, and continues to be taught in schools. The topic of feudalism is certainly popular on /r/AskHistorians which has seen fascinating and fruitful debate, sometimes in unexpected places. Sometimes it has led to tired repetition and moaning (from both sides) that 'feudalism was not a contemporary concept / can you please define what you mean by feudalism' or that we 'aren't explaining why feudalism doesn't exist'.

One of the troublesome things about using the word feudalism is definition. So, we must begin by testing your patience with a little bit of an introduction.

'Feudalism' is a broad term which has been presented by historians, most familiar being Marc Bloch and F.L. Ganshof, as complete models of medieval society covering law, culture and economics. Often 'feudalism' in the public mind, and for historians, is associated with knights, nobles, kings, castles, fiefs, lords, and vassals. Others might conceive of it in a socio-economic sense (the Marxist idea of appropriation of the means of production, in this case land, and tensions between classes). For many people it just means the medieval period (c.450-c.1450), often with its partner, 'The Dark Ages'. Commonly feudalism is used as an all encompassing concept, completely descriptive, such that when someone says 'It was a feudal society,' or 'They had feudal ties,' or 'He ruled as a feudal lord', the audience is supposed to understand implicitly what that means.

Feudalism is an intellectual construct created by legal antiquarians of the late sixteenth-century, developed and imposed by economists, intellectuals and historians onto the medieval period. The word itself first appeared in French, English, and German in the nineteenth-century. At the height of its popularity, feudalism purported to model the socio-political, legal, economic, and cultural world of the Middle Ages between the late Carolingians (c.850) and the later Middle Ages (c.1485).

The call for 'feudalism' to be 'deposed' was instigated in the 1970s by Elizabeth Brown in her groundbreaking paper ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and the Historians of Medieval Europe’. In 1994, a major assault was launched on the cornerstones of feudalism (ie Susan Reynolds’ Fiefs and Vassals) which revisited the sources with a critical eye. Her argument was that scholars, including great medieval historians, read the evidence expecting to find feudalism and then forced evidence to fit the received model of feudalism. Of course, the 'evidence' is often a matter of debate itself. The critiques made by historians like Reynolds have been met variously with denial, applause and caution. But Reynolds' critiques have been tested different ways in the past 20 years and many medievalists have found her ideas persuasive and well-founded. But it is still hotly debated. This AMA was created, in part, to discuss recent scholarship and explore how it changes well established theories about medieval political and social worlds....and maybe shed a little more light on an often confusing subject.

This AMA does have one rule which is really a product of the history of feudalism itself : as mentioned above, feudalism means many different things to different people. To some it might mean the hierarchical structure epitomized by the neat and tidy ‘feudal pyramid’, or it might mean a specific aspect of ties between classes or the socio-economic conflicts, or to some it might be an amalgamation of popular culture sources like Game of Thrones, D&D, Lord of the Rings, or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Therefore if you are going to reference 'feudalism' in your question (or other associated terms like vassal, fief, or service) we ask that you attempt to explain what you mean when you use those terms. We can't actually discuss feudalism if we don't understand what you mean by it! Historians have been guilty of using the word indiscriminately, but there are three general groups which loosely describe how historians use the term ‘feudalism’:

1. The legal rules, rights, and obligations that governed the holding of fiefs (feuda in medieval Latin), especially in the Middle Ages;

2. A social economy in which landed lords dominated a subject peasantry from whom they demanded rents, labor services, and various other dues, and over whom they exercised justice;

3. A form of socio-political organization dominated by a military class, who were connected to each other by ties of lordship and subordination (“vassalage”) and who in turn dominated a subject peasantry;

A good grounding in this is Frederic Cheyette's essay, 'Feudalism: the history of an idea', (Unpublished, 2005).

As for AMA questions, we're keeping it to Western European society 700-1450 CE. Topics include: the historiography and theory of feudalism; representation of feudalism during the Middles Ages in modern media; historical and medieval concepts of overlordship and lordship (monarchical, noble/aristocratic, tenurial, or serfdom and slavery); rural, town, and city hierarchy and community; socio-political bonds (acts of homage, oaths of fidelity, ‘vassalage’, and 'chivalry'); law (land and other property, violence, and private warfare); economic relations; and alternatives to ‘feudalism’.

Things we explicitly are not dealing with:

• 'daily life of so-and-so' questions (these are impossible to cover in an AMA)

• no specific battle, fighting techniques or medieval arms and armour questions - that is a separate AMA is coming in August!

That said, this AMA is still very wide ranging and, of course, not even the boldest scholar would claim to be able to discuss the entirety of the medieval social and political world. So while these topics are on the table it should be recognised that we might not be able to answer all of them, especially if questions fall well outside of our training or research interests.

Your AMA medievalists:

/u/TheGreenReaper7 : holds an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from University College London. His chief research outputs have been on the 'ritual of homage', regarded in Classical feudal historiography as the ‘great validating act of the whole feudal model’ (quote from Paul Hyams, 'Homage and Feudalism', 2002).

/u/idjet : A post-grad (desiring some privacy) who studies medieval heresy and inquisition, with particular interest in the intersection of religion, politics, and economics in western Europe from the Carolingians to 1350 CE.

EDIT Both being in Europe /u/TheGreenReaper7 and/u/idjet are tired and going to sleep! They'll check in on new questions and comments in the morning.

Pic #1 (http://imgur.com/CtWLkmH,F4Cp7Nz#0)

Pic #2 (http://imgur.com/CtWLkmH,F4Cp7Nz#1)

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2br0bq/til_dr_pepper_is_the_oldest_soda_thats_still/

From a TIL (I'm sorry).

What is the oldest mass produced food product? Which mass produced food products are least changed?