Excerpt

In her book Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, Kathleen Davis writes of the temporal regulation that divides “a religious Middle Ages and a secular modernity.”¹ Davis contests simple caricatures of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and asks “why, in the face of all challenges to teleological and stage-oriented histories, do the monoliths medieval/religious/feudal and modern/secular/capitalist (or ‘developed’) survive, and what purposes do they serve?”² Calling into question the Christian teleological concept of time (among others), Davis complicates the act of periodization itself by insisting on its political nature. She states…