ABSTRACT
Both the chronology and the geography have enabled me to use the invaluable work of the Annales historians and in particular Georges Duby. The epoch under consideration is roughly speaking from the tenth to the twelfth century and the geography is for most part north-western Europe. In this way primogeniture halted the fragmentation and dissolution of authority that the author described a little earlier and linked in a common interest the whole of the ruling aristocracy from king to vassal. This interest is to be understood as a transformation of the power/knowledge network and not as a result of individual agents; in other words it exists in the domain of Foucault’s diagram – intentional but non-subjective. The question of authorisation was important to the first half of the twelfth century, and was paralleled by the emergence of discourses that constituted a series of problematisations that became a site of a struggle for regulation.
