Here is the first general account of the religious and irreligious ideas entertained by the populace at large in the Middle Ages. Between 1000 and 1300, vital changes took place in thought and art and religious inspiration, and the renewal of urban life in a world still centered on the feudal knight and peasant. How can we enter the minds of the mass of the people during those centuries? How did laymen look upon bishops and popes, the Bible, the saints; how did they regard judgment, heaven and hell? The answers to such questions lie in what remains of the churches in which people worshipped, in the images of stone and glass they valued, in contemporary poems and songs, and in other scattered sources. But the evidence requires careful and imaginative interpretation, and this the authors have provided, bringing each theme to life in text and pictures and expertly supplying the framework of a historical context.--From publisher description.

This new edition is a marvelous teaching tool and true feast for the intellectually curious. - Daniel Bornstein, Texas A&M University

Western European civilization in the medieval centuries was a time of significant development as the ascendency of the Roman Catholic Church spread Christianity throughout Europe. This book examines the religious life of this formative period, the history of the institutional Church, and focuses on the interaction between the Church and secular members of society. This new edition has been updated, and includes new visual evidence and a glossary of technical terms.

These ten essays by John Van Engen situate religion in the history of medieval Western Europe: as an unavoidable presence in everyday life, as a conceptual framework for social and political life, as a force integral to its historical dynamics. Four of the essays are bibliographical and retrospective in nature, reviewing the field broadly, but also pointing toward a more dialectical approach to understanding the interaction of religion and society in the European middle ages. Other studies deal with large topics usually subsumed under the abstract term 'Christianization'. They grapple with learned sources as well as those associated with 'popular' religion, and show what can be gained from an imaginative use of all that lawyers and theologians said about religion in their society. The essays, finally, look for the quality and dynamic of change, even inventiveness, released by religious action and conviction in medieval European society.

This book represents the culmination of David Nirenberg s ongoing project; namely, how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other in the Middle Ages, and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been scripture based studies of the three religions of the book that claim descent from Abraham, but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each otherall in the name of Godin periods and places both long ago and far away. Whether Christian Crusaders and settlers in Islamic-ruled lands, or Jewish-Muslim relations in Christian-controlled Iberia, for Nirenberg, the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the other over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three neighbors define (and continue to define) themselves and their place in the here-and-nowand the here-afterin terms of one another. Arguing against exemplary histories, static models of tolerance versus prosecution, or so-called Golden Ages and Black Legends, Nirenberg offers here instead a story that is more dynamic and interdependent, one where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities have re-imagined themselves, not only as abstractions of categories in each other s theologies and ideologies, but by living with each other every day as neighbors jostling each other on the street. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage, to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination, to strategies of bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetryNirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to coproduce the future."

During the Middle Ages, many occult rituals and beliefs existed and were practiced alongside those officially sanctioned by the church. While educated clergy condemned some of these as magic, many of these practices involved religious language, rituals, or objects. For instance, charms recited to cure illnesses invoked God and the saints, and love spells used consecrated substances such as the Eucharist. Magic and Religion in Medieval England explores the entanglement of magical practices and the clergy during the Middle Ages, uncovering how churchmen decided which of these practices to deem acceptable and examining the ways they persuaded others to adopt their views. Covering the period from 1215 to the Reformation, Catherine Rider traces the change in the church’s attitude to vernacular forms of magic. She shows how this period brought the clergy more closely into contact with unofficial religious practices than ever before, and how this proximity prompted them to draw up precise guidelines on distinguishing magic from legitimate religion. Revealing the necessity of improving clerical education and the pastoral care of the laity, Magic and Religion in Medieval England provides a fascinating picture of religious life during this period.

Religious experience in the European Middle Ages represented an intersection of a range of aspects of existence, including everyday life, relations of power, and urban development, among others. As such, religion offered a reflection of many facets of life in this period. This book brings together scholars from different parts of the world who use a variety of different examples from the medieval era to show this specific path through which to reach a renewed perspective for understanding the European Middle Ages.