Europeization in Medieval Studies: An “Historical” Research Strategy? In Search For the Beginnings of Globalization
Based on retrogression, the europeizational strategy in medieval studies creates an image of the arising continental unity as the result of the expansion of a particular model of organization of the society and culture emanating from the post-Carolinian center between X and XIV century. This occidentalized image is anachronical: it privileges analogies between contemporary processes of European integration and ignores the mental horizons of generations living at the times of the “medieval” europeization. The use of this notion still allows one to accentuate the significant, although quite narrow in terms of the cultural milieu, aspect of cultural homogenization of the Old Continent on the threshold of its modern political and civilizational expansion toward the New World regarded as the beginning of globalization
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