Piers Plowman and the reinvention of church law in the late Middle Ages

Abstract

from case to case, but few of them ‘travelled the whole road to liberal democracy in the 1990s’ (p. 225), and China and Cuba interpreted ‘1989ʹ as a cautionary tale. When the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ worlds were merging into the Global North, the book turns our attention to the sense of abandonment and betrayal in the Global South, as a new Iron Curtain appeared in the Mediterranean. The final chapter, ‘A World without “1989”’, plays the role of a lengthy, ersatz conclusion. The focus on the illiberal backlashes, especially since the 2008 crisis, and their rejection of the post-1989 teleology is an obvious choice, but because it deals with recent and still ongoing developments (which means that some of the examples have, or are likely to, become irrelevant – for better or for worse), and because it lacks some of the politically sharpened analytical insight exhibited elsewhere in the book, the chapter appears somewhat weaker than the rest of the book. It should be noted that rather than an edited volume, a form that could be expected given the breadth and complexity of the topic, this is a co-authored work that reads as if written by a single hand. The ambitious scope and breadth of detail, strong points of the book, also cause some minor issues, which, admittedly, would be difficult to avoid. There is some repetition, usually of larger claims, when the same or similar issues are discussed in relation to different cases. And while the authors abundantly show the quick-paced developments and changes in positions of individuals and groups, especially in 1989 itself, the non-linear narration occasionally requires careful reading in order to establish a chronology. Some of its main arguments may seem simple, but this is a dense and complex book that could appeal to specialists (it already has) more than those who would profit immensely from it – students. Finally, if by challenging the ‘myth of 1989ʹ and pointing to the global connectedness of European state socialism (not only in this book), this Exeter-affiliated group of historians has convincingly dispelled the notion of socialist Eastern Europe as a collection of passive, uniform Soviet satellites, the emerging picture of globally entangled socialist states and societies might in the long run replace one type of uniformity with another, which would do a disservice to this consequential endeavour.