At 03:31 PM 9/21/99 +0200, Paul Spice wrote: >It is a difficult thing for a
20th century scholar (for are we not all >scholars on this list?) to see
through the eyes of a medieval farmer! >Christianity offers a basic
framework for a belief system, but what >illiterate farmers thought a
thousand years ago is hard to discover.
I don’t think there is something simple in the work of an historian. Not for
this we can get out of answering to an important question. To know in which
way our ancestors saw determinated aspects of their reality is fundamental
for us, becouse in this way we can understand what we still have from that
time and which are our progresses (if we have some). In this case,
religious mentality (I say christian mentality becouse our western world
have a christian heritage and forming) is of primary importance since willy
- nilly we grow up in mental cathegories for a great part formed by our
christian heritage. In my opinion, the modern man has much more we think in
common with a medieval farmer, as there are some traditions, mentalities,
mental mechanisms that are so similar through the ages as far as our own age
and is historian’s duty reconstruct, becouse they are cultural symptoms.
Fabrizio Conti
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