Merum Imperium and Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (original) (raw)

The Forum medieval era. There are the very real dangers of anachronism, of course-a fact amply attested to by Markus Fisher's (1992) deeply flawed effort to apply the insights of realism to medieval geopolitics. But as I hope I have demonstrated in my own work, it is certainly possible to apply the methods and concepts of, say, IR constructivism to the international relations of the later Middle Ages (Latham 2011(Latham , 2012 and to do so with effect. Indeed, I would suggest that, done with due care and a healthy historical sensibility, applying constructivism and other IR theories to the premodern political order is no more inherently anachronistic than applying approaches and methods originally developed to analyze the high modern sovereign-states system to the postmodern post-sovereign-states system of today.