Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea of a division between a and "medieval and " and a and "modern and " period has survived, even flourished, in academia. Periodization and Sovereignty demonstrates that this survival is no innocent affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of and "the Middle Ages and " and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism. This book's groundbreaking investigation of feudal historiography finds that the historical formation of and "feudalism and " mediated the theorization of sovereignty and a social contract, even as it provided a rationale for colonialism and facilitated the disavowal of slavery. Sovereignty is also at the heart of today's often violent struggles over secular and religious politics, and Davis traces the relationship between these struggles and the narrative of and "secularization, and " which grounds itself in a period divide between a and "modern and " historical consciousness and a theologically entrapped and "Middle Ages and " incapable of history. This alignment of sovereignty, the secular, and the conceptualization of historical time, which relies essentially upon a medieval modern divide, both underlies and regulates today's volatile debates over world politics. The problem of defining the limits of our most fundamental political concepts cannot be extricated, Davis argues, from the periodizing operations that constituted them, and that continue today to obscure the process by which and "feudalism and " and and "secularization and " govern the politics of time.