Essentially, Davis offers an exploration of the relationship between medieval and modern--conceptions of the divide, historiography, medievalisms, and, at the heart of it all, what it means to characterize the Middle Ages from a historical lens. At the center of her argument, Davis questions our understandings of a "post-medieval" era, examining the category of post-medieval itself (although she does not explicitly call it this) and calling for a dissolution of periodizing narratives. More specifically, Davis's analysis revolves around a "matrix of terms" interrelated and relevant to the issues of politics and periodization: "medieval," "modern," "periodization," "sovereignty," "feudalism," and "secularization." Examining past historical work, she identifies a problematic binary system between medieval/modern and feudalism/secularization--and she seeks to break down this approach.
In chapters 1 and 2, Davis establishes the development of "feudalism" in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century legal rhetoric, especially in relation to ideas of imperial sovereignty and colonialism. By examining these developments, she seeks to establish direct links between categorical period divides (medieval/modern) and issues of political imperialism. She is particularly concerned with the retrospective creation of "feudal law" used to both support and oppose notions of sovereignty in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. In this historiographical survey, she also questions what, in her introduction, she approaches as "medievalism at the heart of the theoretical enterprise of modernity" (8). Thus many of her concepts of the "feudal origin story" and historiography could be well applied to other aspects of understanding retrospective approaches to the medieval (or medievalism)--for instance, ideas of "'forgetting' and 'rediscovery'" (60), "retrospective desire," and the "space of transition out of a feudal past" (74).
Moving away from the historiographical development of feudalism, chapters 3 and 4 deal more directly with temporality and periodization. In chapter 3, Davis provides the historiographical and theoretical framework for her own ideas: the background of debates on time and periodization in relation to politics. This chapter especially questions theories that "disrupted a clean-cut medieval/modern, sacred vs. secular divide" (78), and deals with the "anachronism" of epochal theories (91). The main issue with this chapter, however, is a problem of implicit argument, as Davis does not explicitly contribute her own voice to the debates. Instead, she offers an overview of previous theories and their implications upon periodization--but rarely interacts with these theories by providing her own amplifications. Her framework, however, allows for stepping into these debates as her book certainly does in its own implicit manner.
Chapter 4 may be read as the culmination of Davis's book, in that it draws on the theoretical framework of questioning periodization and systematic binaries like medieval/modern, religious/secular, theological/political through examining the historical work of the Venerable Bede. This, in my view, is the most productive chapter of the book: Davis uses a medieval figure in order to demonstrate the problems in our modern assumptions. Bede's history stands in stark opposition to the historiographies of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century legists already discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Rather than examining modern historians looking back on the medieval era, Davis examines the ways in which Bede's history inherently breaks down our assumptions about the medieval. She thus displays Bede as both a historian and temporal theoretician: his works both produce and work against tensions of periodization to create a systematic "link... [of] the incarnation [i.e. of Jesus] with political time" (104). Davis demonstrates that Bede's work opposes a medieval/modern, religious/secular conception of history, in that he synthesizes "multiple temporal schemes that coordinate" these seemingly disparate notions (112). Davis also juxtaposes Bede with a reflection ("more meditation than argument" [103]) on Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. Unfortunately, these links are not as clearly drawn as they could be, and Davis's thoughts on Ghosh are not nearly as helpful as those on Bede.
As may be apparent from what I have outlined, Davis's book offers a highly theoretical historiographical overview rather than a practical application of her arguments. This is not to disparage Davis, however, as this monograph is an intelligent, ambitious, reflective, and beneficial approach to history. There is much in this book that can help to undo our assumptions about the medieval and the modern--if, indeed, we may even approach these two as separate or categorically different. Her main call remains a strong and relevant one for all of us working in history touching on the medieval: "as soon as we begin to pluralize the 'medieval' in any meaningful way, we begin to undermine the condition of possibility of the periodizing operation" (5). It is this pluralization that she seeks to establish, and that should be taken up. This may be where future scholarship will benefit most from the approaches developed in Periodization and Sovereignty, as Davis's theoretical outlook certainly calls for extending these issues into other explorations. For example, there are surely other sources and authors--throughout history--to be analyzed (in ways similar to Davis's discussion of Bede) in to argue for the "death" of periodizing historical narratives.
