Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, although many people view the religion of the Middle Ages as a monolithic institution centering on the Catholic Church and its doctrines, authors Rosalind and Christopher Brooke in "Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe 1000-1300" show that this picture is too simplistic. The author points out that these writers approached the topic not in terms of the church and its clergy, but from the point of view of the laity, believers, and non-believers, including beliefs in superstition and magic.The paper concludes that the issues examined by the writers serve to define religious belief in any era, although in the period they discuss, the choices of the people were clearly fewer than would be true today.

From the Paper:

"To explain this, they discuss the social structure of the period from the royalty at the top to the peasants toiling at the bottom of the social scale. The authors also note that there was a religious revival in the 9th and 10th centuries and that the "monastic cloister was the center of a deeply influential, deeply admired way of life B a ritual life with elaborate liturgy at its center - a life for relatively few dedicated monks, not in itself an expression of popular religion" (48). This way of life is still seen as central to the life and belief systems of the time, for the religious orders influenced the people and colored how they viewed religion and religious expression."

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