Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l'histoire et l'Europe féodale

The three Indo-European functions, the historian and feudal Europe Jacques Le Goff Historians, and especially mediaevalists, are taking a growing interest in the tri-functional model (the functions of religion force and fertility) in Indo-European culture as demonstrated by Georges Dumézil. In Les trois Ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme, Georges Duby, studying the appearance, eclipse and re-emergence of the model between the year 1000 and the beginning of the 12th century between the Loire and the Meuse reconstructs around it an entire model of mediaeval society and sheds light on the relations between actual social structures and society's ideological models. In a bibliographical review of the subject, Gerhard Oexle examines the conceptual historical problems surrounding Adalberon of Laon's Carmen ad Rotbertum regem, recently published and translated, with commentary, by Claude Carozzi, reviving the significance of this work. In I sacerdoti, i guerrieri, i contadini, Ottavia Niccoli traces the fate of this model, through iconography, from the Middles Ages to the French Revolution. Aaron Gurevic compares the pagan Scandinavian tripartition with the Christian mediaeval tripartition. The main point concerns not the problem of the origins of this model but why, how, and for whose benefit it operated. The logic of the model suggests that the nodal points of the historical problem are : the transition from two categories to three, the relations between the first two orders and the third (promoted then demoted), the presence of labourers and work in the model, the role of kingship the transformation of tri-functionalism into quadri- functionalism. The trifunctional model is a useful tool for the study of feudal society between the 10th and the 19th centuriesLe Goff Jacques. Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l'histoire et l'Europe féodale. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 34ᵉ année, N. 6, 1979. pp. 1187-1215