13056

SoSe 21: Popular religion in late antiquity and the early middle ages

Stefan Esders

Kommentar

This seminar aims to provide a methodological, historiographical, anthropological and historical basis to analyze and discuss popular religion in late antiquity and early medieval period. Traditionally, popular culture and religion have always been a topic of heated debate among scholars, for any definition of its features risk to fall into biased or anachronistic notions of “people” and “culture”. The seminar’s first part will be dedicated to the historiographical discussion about what is popular religion and the possibility of studying this phenomenon from the fourth to the eleventh century. We will analyze the terminology and the methodology of cultural and religious studies, also glimpsing the anthropological meaning of popular religion and how to apply these concepts to our study. The second part will go directly to the investigation of the sources to see examples of how people were doing and interpreting religion in their everyday life. In the period studied in this seminar, Christian religion was already hegemonic in most of Western Europe, so our investigation will deal with people’s conceptions and practices of Christianity. As it will be clear, popular religion was often considered as subversive and unorthodox, being presented by the sources as deviations and contaminations. We will read the sources that indirectly give information about people’s behavior towards religious interpretations and practices. Through our analysis it will emerge that popular religion was profoundly marked by mixing and exchange between traditional religions and culture and Christianity. In this scenario, ecclesiastical authorities had to compromise in order to accommodate people’s expectations regarding religious practices. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Filotas, Bernadette , Pagan survivals and popular culture in the Early Middle Ages, New York 2005. Grig, Lucy, Caesarius of Arles and the campaign against popular culture in late antiquity, in: Early Medieval Europe 26 (2018) pp. 61-81. Hen, Yitzhak, Religion and culture in Merovingian Gaul, AD 481-751, Leiden 1995. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N., Popular Religion in Visigothic Spain, in: Edward James (ed.), Visigothic Spain. New approaches, Oxford 1980, pp. 3-60. Meens, Rob, Penance in Medieval Europe, 600-1200, Cambridge 2014. Palmer, James, Defining paganism in the Carolingian world, in Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007), pp. 402-425. Schließen