medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> I'll add something to the mix: I bet that if you look at the sites you'll
> find traces of earlier veneration there or stories of "white ladies." Lots
> of times the statue is from a much earlier era, right?
Francine,
Herein lies a huge historiographic problem. Let's say, to take a
"typical" case, that the statue dates from the 11th century. By the
14th or 15th century, its origins may well have been pushed back
several hundred years. It seems clear that oral legends were
accumulating rather prolifically in the later Middle Ages, and even
past that time, well into the 17th century (when, incidentially, the
church was often actively trying to suppress such "popular
belief"). Stories of "white ladies", intimations of previous
mother goddess cults, all sorts of "histories" spring up after the
fact, but seldom can they be substantiated earlier than this period,
either archaeologically or by reference to written sources. Oral
history, as it is practiced today, has a strict method and some
distinct limitations (people interviewed recently who lived through
the Second World War have proferred "reminiscences", for example,
which clearly link events important to them that were actually quite
separate), but dealing with oral traditions for which there is
virtually no indication of their age makes reconstructing the terms
of reference for "medieval" people almost impossible: they have at
the very least been subject to a continuous process of
reinterpretation that was not primarily motivated by historical
rigor. It is like watching, on film, one face "morphing" into
another. How, or at what moment, do you describe that face? For
the Middle Ages, all we have, in dealing with such traditions, is
the end of the process; what we want to understand are the early
stages of the process. When dealing with the "medieval mindset"
concerning such practices, it sometimes seems to me that all we can
really say about it is that it was never written down very fully and
is probably substantially unrecoverable. In such a circumstance, a
contemporary framework of interpretation may not be perfect, but it
is necessary if we want to talk about the phenomenon at all.
To respond to Frank and Marjorie's responses, I would quite happily
be willing to "do violence to the facts" -- to a moderate extent --
if that were necessary, but I really don't know what the facts are.
Most of the studies I've dealt with, so far, are quite content to do
without footnotes, and where sources are given, as often as not, it
is the local curate, passing along highly local legends. It is
sometimes easy to understand when "legend" cannot be correct or is
very unlikely, but seldom possible to decide when it is a valid
reflection of "what happened" or even when it originated.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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