SE Academic Review 2023

48 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

experience. They highlight that medieval people experienced their own form of global activities and thought processes. Such contributions from medieval historians of Europe means that their research can speak to the findings of specialists of other periods of history, creating dialogues about what it meant to be a global or globalizing person at different points in history. An emic approach, therefore, can illuminate the sophistication of the medieval era and, perhaps unexpectedly, enhance its centrality to global studies more broadly. Rather than deviate from notions of the ‘global’, enquiries into the inner consciousness of medieval Europeans brings us closer to defining global societies. By forging conceptions of the ‘global’ that are characterized by individuals who lived during the Middle Ages, historians of the period can add nuanced and distinct contributions to the way historians understand global history, opening up questions about the historicity and anachronism of our own notions of the global. history. Taken as a whole, the sections of this essay demonstrate a reciprocal benefit. The global history approach is useful to historians of medieval Europe, and in return their research can advance the field of global history. Medieval historians must now bring themselves from the peripheries of global history to engage in debates with and contribute insights to those specialists that have previously dominated its direction, although some attempts at cross-period dialogue have begun recently (Belich, 2016). For the sake of global history, maybe historians should avoid framing scholarship within periodizations such as ‘Ancient’, ‘Medieval’, ‘Early Modern’ and ‘Modern’? These terms are loaded with misleading presumptions and can alienate practitioners and entrench unhelpful assumptions about the individuals that lived in those times. One of the founding principles of the global history approach was the ambition to write history that was more inclusive of individuals in the past. The time has now come for global historians to be more inclusive of their colleagues in the present.

Finally, an emic knowledge-building agenda can decentre knowledge production and dismantle prevailing ‘universal’ frameworks and periodizations (Power, Peša, & Honda, 2020, p. 33). This can be considered in the context of ‘undoing’ dominant conceptions that derive from entrenched colonial narratives. Amanda Power’s recent work has pursued this ambition, concentrating, for example, on our understanding of the history of ‘Africa’ which is currently limited in its appreciation of differences of locality, race, and gender (Power, Peša, & Honda, p. 38). Not only is the emic approach useful for pushing back against the dominance of the westernized epistemic viewpoints that have underpinned historiography in the last two centuries, but the process of ‘undoing’ colonial narratives can challenge the perception that the Middle Ages was merely a precursor to a modernized era. Constructing studies that are alert to the way historical participants perceived their lives harnesses the subjectivity of their lived IV It is clear that the global history approach provides substantial benefits to historians of medieval Europe. Firstly, comparative analysis of expansion across medieval Europe shows that the process of ‘Europeanization’ gave a character of proto globalization to the region. This characteristic reveals a uniform society forged through processes of colonization, which subsequently demands for the history of European colonialism to be set against this backdrop of the growth of Latin Christendom in Europe. Secondly, a comparative global method can reconstruct previous interpretations of disease history, such as the Black Death. Conceptualizing a new sense of the Black Death’s globality invites new questions about Europe’s experience, whilst highlighting that long distance trade could be considered a medieval phenomenon. Finally, an emic approach to defining the terms ‘global’ and ‘globalizing’, can show that medieval people engaged consciously within globalizing networks. This approach encourages broader disciplinary dialogue between medievalists and historians of other periods to compare and connect notions of the ‘global’ at different points in