SE Academic Review 2023

47 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

“ In the Aztec global universe, therefore, gods

evolves through time and space, historians need to consider what ‘global’, or ‘globalizing’, meant within the specificities of the time (Pennock & Power, 2018, p. 90). They understood the people of Aztec Mexico and the Latin West as ‘globalizing’ cosmologies because their lives evoked a process of engagement with their cosmology, through which their world view translated to conscious activity (Pennock & Power, p. 93). For example, Aztec belief structure merged spiritual and earthly realms so that land, cem-anahuac , which was surrounded by a great orb of water, ilhuicaatl , existed perpendicular to the underworlds below of Mictlan and the heavens above the terrestrial world, Tlalticpac (Pennock & Power, p. 95). In the Aztec global universe, therefore, gods and humans coexisted in a way that gave society a globalized cosmology. Similarly, it is shown that the people of Latin Christendom lived as members of a globalized cosmology because they could interact with the causative powers of the cosmos. Relics, pilgrimages and prayers featured among the elements of medieval European life, providing access points for invoking powers that transcended beyond those of humans and were seen to reverberate on a global scale (Pennock & Power, p. 98). Thus, by situating the cultural and temporal specificity of the term ‘global’ at the heart of an investigation, it is possible to create nuance and subtlety in scholarship of the medieval period that makes medieval global studies distinct from, and not in need of, the concepts that drive studies of other periods. Not only does the emic approach enable examinations of global phenomena on a macro level, its emphasis on the need for period specificity simultaneously warrants micro levels of analysis. This would allay criticisms of the global method that have come from historians, such as David Bell (2013), whose contention is that the network concept in the global history method fails to recognise the instances in the ‘very small spaces’ of history. The emic philosophy in Pennock and Power’s study shows that Bell’s criticism of the network approach is misplaced because the primacy of inductive knowledge building in Pennock and Power’s research means that those ‘small spaces’ are revealed. This is illustrated in their exposition of how the activities of women on an everyday level were crucial to the people’s interaction with the divine cosmos. Whilst Aztec women acted as guardians of the domestic hearthstone to appease the ‘Old God’ Huehueteotl and safeguarded men against misfortune on the

and humans coexisted in a way that gave society a globalized cosmology. ”

battlefield by preparing tamales with great care, so, too, women of Latin Europe performed prayers of intercession and devoted themselves to the vita apostolica to entreat wide-reaching spiritual intervention and divine approval when clerical roles were unavailable to them (Pennock & Power, 2018, pp. 112-113). Engaging in this micro analysis of networks is especially useful to historians of medieval Europe because it shows the agency of individuals who participated in and engaged actively with a bigger globalized network. The idea of large, globalized networks in the Middle Ages has been explored by Glen Dudbridge in the context of the movement of non-commodity assets (Dudbridge, 2018). Human agency at the peripheries of regions was a missing feature of Bartlett’s research above, which means that emic global studies can show that medieval people performed erudite and complex everyday interactions within a globalized network at all levels of society. This degree of agency shown by applying the global history approach reveals that the Middle Ages was not a period of archaic premodernism, but was one of mindful interactions performed in a world equally global in nature as that of more recent periods in history.