Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> While I suspect that much scholarly aversion to merchants arises from class-guilt on the part of scholars who desire to launder our own middle-class origins the sim- plicity and descriptive power of the three-estates model itself have enabled its dominance as a paradigm. If we imagined that the three estates were a universal ideology of the Middle Ages reliance upon that model might at least seem true to period values but Georges Duby argues convincingly that the ideology of the three exstates was never universally descriptive but was instead a contingent social model created for France around the year 1000. It is the lasting ideological power of this imagined social structure that impinges on my study of literary representations of mer- chants their sins and virtues. Despite the historical contingency of the three-estate theory it is remarkable how it still permeates the study of medieval literature and not just that of estates satire. Although historians have long since abandoned the three estates as a descriptive model. (LL)