For a long time scholars have identified and studied the feudal revolution and the origins of the Italian city communes as two major phenomena of the central Middle Ages. But historians have seldom tried to compare them, even less understand them as two manifestations of a larger process. The point of this paper is to show how both are underpinned by the same logic: the breakdown of wider power structures and their simultaneous replacement by a set of increasingly formalized, locally-based, structures which were until then more informal. With that aim, it synthesizes the profuse literature of the feudal revolution and then analyses some Italian examples, which are the main focus of the paper. It suggests a new way of understanding the origins of the communes, as the result of a dialectic between formal and informal structures. In conclusion, the paper looks at the whole dynamics of social and political change in the central Middle Ages, through a discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus theory.
