For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europe

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 165-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Lord's Prayer ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
The People ◽  
Graphic Illustration ◽  
The Cross ◽  
In The Beginning

There has long been some measure of agreement that European people in the middle ages adhered to a form of Christianity which was ‘folklorised’, ‘enchanted’, or ‘magical’. Interwoven with the traditional creeds and the orthodox liturgy were numerous beliefs and practices which were intended to ensure spiritual and bodily welfare, and guard against misfortune. To the endless frustration of theologians, ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ stubbornly refused to remain clearly separate, despite the intellectual effort expended in forcing them into different compartments. ‘Superstitious’ rites or beliefs repeatedly intersected with the official Catholic cult. It was believed that if a talisman were placed under an altar-cloth during mass, it would acquire spiritual potency. Orthodox prayers were constantly adapted to serve the needs of popular magic. Clergy, let alone layfolk, found the line between acceptable and superstitious practice difficult to draw. For a graphic illustration of this problem, one need only look at the following recipe for curing a hailstorm caused by sorcery:But against hailstones and storms, besides those things said earlier about raising the sign of the cross, this remedy may be used: three little hailstones are thrown into the fire with the invocation of the most Holy Trinity; the Lord's Prayer with the Angelic Salutation is added twice or three times, and the Gospel of St John, ‘In the beginning was the word’, while the sign of the cross is made against the storm from all quarters, before and behind, and from every part of the earth. And then, when at the end one repeats three times, ‘the Word was made flesh’, and says three times after that, ‘by these Gospels uttered, may that tempest flee’, then suddenly, so long as the storm was caused to happen by sorcery, it will cease.

J. H. Chajes. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 278 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-380
Author(s):  
Anne Oravetz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Spirit Possession ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Judaism ◽  
Complex Subject

Jewish mystical and magical texts are remarkably relevant to some of the most central historiographical themes of early modern Europe; they are also remarkably esoteric and confounding to any nonspecialist. Providing a remedy to this incongruity, J. H. Chajes makes a major contribution to both Jewish and general early modern historiography with his first book, on Jewish spirit possession and exorcism. His work offers a useful narrative of the development of Jewish exorcism traditions, presenting the complex subject in terms that make it more approachable without over-simplification. At the same time, Chajes lends the material depth and relevance through sensitive analysis of the chronologically and geographically local circumstances of the most significant early modern treatments of the phenomenon. The appendix alone would be an offering of some significance, consisting of eleven original translations of early modern accounts of spirit possession, and this quality of presenting important raw material runs throughout the volume. Competent and detailed legwork is evident in the exposition of various exorcists' techniques from the ancient world and Middle Ages, through Luria's unique methods in sixteenth-century Safed, and up to later seventeenth-century attitudes to possession and demonology. Much of this material is in the first chapter, “The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession,” which argues that “there was something new in the sixteenth century” as a long percolation of diverse traditions culminated in the formation of the “classic” view of the dybbuk in a period of unprecedented frequency of possession and exorcism events.

Social Change and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Some Danish Evidence

1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud J. V. Jespersen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Military History ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Military Revolution ◽  
The Middle Ages

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.

‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Persuasive Speech

This book relates a story of the rebirth of conversation in Renaissance and early modern Europe. In the beginning, there was Cicero, who, in the midst of his strictures on the kinds of persuasive speech – the types of rhetoric – wrote scattered paragraphs on how conversation (...

Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many ◽  
Village Society ◽  
Rural England

Exploring the role of credit is vital to understanding any economy. In the past two decades historians of many European regions have become increasingly aware that medieval credit, far from being the preserve of merchants, bankers, or monarchs, was actually of basic importance to the ordinary villagers who made up most of the population. This study is devoted to credit in rural England in the middle ages. Focusing in particular on seven well-documented villages, it examines in detail some of the many thousands of village credit transactions of this period, identifies the people who performed them, and explores the social relationships brought about by involvement in credit. The evidence comes primarily from inter-peasant debt litigation recorded in the proceedings of manor courts, which were the private legal jurisdictions of landlords. A comparative study that discusses the English evidence alongside findings from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe, the book argues that the prevailing view of medieval English credit as a marker of poverty and crisis is inadequate. In fact, the credit networks of the English countryside were surprisingly resilient in the face of the fourteenth-century crises associated with plague, famine, and economic depression.

scholarly journals Astrological Medicine and the Popular Press in Early Modern England

2005 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. 73-93
Author(s):  
Louise Curth
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
University Curriculum ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
Huge Variety

For many centuries the study of the stars was considered to be a science in western Europe. In the middle ages both astrology and astronomy, thought be the practical and theoretical parts of the scientific study of the celestial heavens, were taught as part of the university curriculum. The advent of printing in the late fifteenth century resulted in a huge variety of publications that provided the general public with access to this knowledge. This essay will examine the major role that almanacs, which were cheap, mass-produced astrological publications, played in disseminating information about astrological medical beliefs and practices to a national audience.

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