While Kelly’s working on finishing her response to my response, I shall content myself with mocking one of the Rational Response Squad’s hangers-on. I note with some amusement that he’s genuinely convinced of my “ignorance”:
I won’t make any more comments on Day’s supposed understanding apart from his suggestion that there was no feudalism in Europe – what more can I say? Hats off to him for being just as ignorant as that theist someone mentioned in the RD fora, who said that there was nothing bad about the Dark Ages, and that at least kids got a decent education…
From the Medieval Sourcebook:
“The usefulness of feudalism as a term is at present under intense discussion among historians of the middle ages, with the majority of experts now rejecting the term.
Feudalism was not a word used in the middle ages. It has had two quite distinct meanings in recent usage. The first meaning – promoted by radicals during the French Revolution and developed by Marxist historians – refers to a social system based on a society in which peasant agriculture is the fundamental productive activity; in which slavery is non-existent or marginal but peasants are tied to the land in some way; and in which a small elite defined by military activity dominates.. This is probably the most important meaning in modern popular usage.
For most of the 20th-century, professional medievalists have given the term a quite different meaning [see F. Ganshof, Feudalism for a classic summary]. For medieval historians the term has come to mean a system of reciprocal personal relations among members of the military elite, which lead ultimately to parliament and then Western democracy.”
It was the nonexistent Jacobin concept of a feudal society that Kelly has in mind, of course, since the other directly contradicts her argument. It’s most amusing that the atheist commenter should bring up the so-called Dark Ages, for as I point out in TIA, it hasn’t been considered a valid concept by professional historians for more than seventy years.