medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dr Jim Bugslag writes:
: On a more positive note, I find, too, that many of
: my predictably rebellious students taking Medieval
: Art History ( ... ) expect my course to be sort of like
: Sunday School, but when I explain that medieval
: people lacked our modern resources in medicine,
: agricultural science, meteorology, etc., etc., and
: had no other recourse than to supernatural help,
: their attitude changes. I try to emphasize that the
: Middle Ages was not some sort of aberrant "pious"
: anomaly in European history, but that real people,
: like themselves, lived there.
This raises an interesting (to me at least) question, as to why
the same issue does not seem to arise for earlier periods:
Greco-Roman antiquity, for example, was a world in which ideas,
structures, and practices that we call "religious" were no less
pervasive, for much the same reasons, although their specific
nature, contours and manifestations may have been rather
different (especially in regard to institutional structure, for
instance); and the old conventionality that ancient polytheism
was a religion primarily of orthopraxy, rather than of what we
might call "faith" or "belief", looks decidedly shaky at this
point. Is it that in that case the religious phenomena
concerned, or their direct desecendents, are either completely
extinct or at least much less visible, so that, unlike with
medieval Chritstianity, Islam, etc., one is not faced with
various groups of students with vested interests: some who see
themselves as of the same religion(s), or of reactions against
them (anti-Catholicism certainly being a factor among some I've
encountered), or of groups that consider themselves (rightly or
wrongly) in some way under threat from those of the same
religion(s)? In other words, is it that students of the ancient
world are more easily able to see the phenomena as just stories /
superstitions / ways of doing things that have no relation to
them; whereas this is obviously not the case when dealing with
religions that still have a highly visible place in the modern
world?
Terrence Lockyer
Johannesburg, South Africa
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