ABSTRACT
The history of Europe, and specifically that of the European middle ages, offers more rewarding phenomena for comparison than the paradigms implied by old and unexamined vocabularies. Irrespective of comparisons, moreover, some of the vocabularies people use within own fields could do with clarification. One early, cogent, and famous plea for comparative history was, however, made by a medievalist, and there has been some discussions about it by modernists. Comparisons that involve other disciplines, such as anthropology, archaeology, and sociology, present yet more problems, even if one can avoid interdisciplinary jealousies. Many of them survive in non-European history even though some are far from obvious in meaning or no longer seem to fit the European evidence. Problems about the possible reasons for increasing stratification and concentration of power – such as greater productivity, population, and wealth, jealousies, and war between groups – concern phenomena rather than terminology.
