medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Jim,
See below.
On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 18:29:07 -0500 you wrote:
>Dear John,
>I wasn't thinking of the Jews or Eastern-rite Christians, nor even of heretics, but of
>non-Christian beliefs which fall within the realm of folklore.
I gathered as much from the final clause of your inquiry. But you had posed that inquiry as a follow-up, addressed to me, on my expression of dissatisfaction with a statement about the extent of conversion to Latin Christianity in medieval Western Europe. So I thought it appropriate to begin with outlining what +I+ found wrong with that statement, even though this did not address your concerns. Which latter, I suspect, have to do chiefly with members of groups already converted, i.e. nominal Christians.
> ... In other words, while the religion of "heretics" is marginalized
>because of its dissent from orthodoxy, a good part of the religion of the peasantry is
>branded as "superstition" because they are just too brutish to come fully on board.
>I'm thinking of, for example, "holy wells", which were often given a superficial
>"Christian" veneer but which do not enter in any manner into the realm of organized
>Christian "theology" and can only at a stretch be considered "Christian". Or like the
>strange agricultural practices that somebody mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a
>different string. I'm beginning to think that this body of "religious belief" was fairly
>substantial, not only in the Middle Ages but well into the Enlightenment,
I have the same impression about the Enlightenment, but that may be because 18th- and 19th-century investigators were interested in "pagan survivals" and reported instances that got into things I have read. But did they correctly interpret what they reported, and how statistically siginificant were these instances in the first place?
but it
>tended to be completely ignored by the medieval church and so appears to be
>almost completely undocumented.
Or when it is documented, it may occur in contexts whose factual accuracy we may find suspect (saint's lives, for example). This is a real problem in assessing the extent of "popular" non-Christian belief in early medieval Italy.
Even the study of "popular religion" seems to
>ignore a lot of these beliefs. So far as I know, anyway. But if anyone knows of
>literature on this aspect of the "non-Christian" Middle Ages, I'd be very grateful.
>
A possible way of getting at this (which has probably already occurred to you) is to have a look at recent work on the ideological content of christianization in medieval Europe to see if any pertinent literature gets footnoted in discussions of post-coversion survivals or adaptations of people's pre-Christian practices. A good place to start might be Carole Cusack's _Conversion among the Germanic Peoples_ (London: Cassell, 1998). Another might be some of the essays in Guyda Armstrong and Ian Wood, eds., _Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals_ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).
Best again,
John Dillon
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