Religion as one of the Leading Actors of Medieval Europe (A Critique of Rodney Stark (original) (raw)
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The Role of Religion in Everyday Life during the middle Ages
International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) , 2023
In the development of behavioral changes among humans the factors of the environment act as vital steps. In that, the performing of spiritual activities acts as one of the most influential activities for improving behavioral and emotional chan ges in humans. The aim of the research is to describe the impact of religious practices and beliefs on the daily lifestyle of humans in the medieval period. Following the impact of religious practices in the medieval period acted as a pathfinder to humans to lead to a successful life. The reflection of the primarily collected data from modern-day historians gives the best information of the people's lifestyle in the medieval era. It finds all the descriptive and statistical analyses of the collected primary data. The stati stical representation is done by the application of the SPSS tool os statistical analysis for the hypothetical testing. The collected data and examined data from the statistical analysis show the relation between the hypothetical relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variable. It shows all the effective impact of religious beliefs in the behavioral and emotional changes of humans in their daily lifestyle.
The mediaeval is present to both sides in the current conflicts between the Anglo-American Protestant powers, who depict themselves as the defenders of our Western Christian Civilization, on the one hand, and the Islamic Middle East, on the other. It belongs to their war of words; both sides hurl the mediaeval as an abuse. On the one side, as in the Middle Ages, Islam thinks itself attacked by a new group of invasive Christian Crusaders, once again desecrating their holy places, occupying their homelands, and massacring them. On the other side, modern Westerners label their Muslim opposition as “mediaeval,” a name evoking the dark and backward, a confusion of religion and the secular bringing cruelty and ignorance. Significantly, however, the “Middle Ages” or “Dark Ages” is a period only within European history. Thus Westerners accusing their adversaries of being mediaeval are attacking something in their own formative history, something about themselves and their past they fear and hate. When we study and evaluate the mediaeval, we are engaged simultaneously in a confrontation with what we represent as an external enemy and with ourselves. The mediaeval as an historical period and cultural characteristic was invented in the European Renaissance—which we treat in the next Section of the Foundation Year Programme. It depicted the immediately preceding centuries as a barren period characterized by darkness and ignorance, in comparison with the earlier glories of Greece and Rome. The proud spirits of the Renaissance supposed themselves to have recaptured and even surpassed the Ancient birth of humanism. The thousand years from 500 C.E. to 1500 C.E. between the two moments of humane light and glory thus became the dark middle period. The view of European history as having a negatively characterised middle was reinforced by the Protestant Reformers. They set the Bible against Christian tradition and sought to recover the purity and simplicity of primitive Christianity behind all the supposed accretions of a thousand years of ecclesiastical mediation. “Gothic” became a term of opprobrium, equivalent to “barbaric.” No such idea of these centuries occurs within Islam. In the millennium between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, Islam spread over and united a world far more vast and more culturally inclusive than Rome ever ruled. Islamic culture assimilated the philosophical, theological, scientific, and technological accomplishments of the Hellenes and Romans, added to them in very significant ways, developed its own proper art, architecture, literature, religious and political forms, and educated a relatively backward and barbaric Europe. In this Section, we shall first look at the conclusion of late Ancient spiritual culture through the Neoplatonisms of Plotinus (died 270) and Iamblichus (250-330), and their Christian continuations in the Latin Augustine (354-430), on the one side, and the Greek Byzantine Dionysius (6th century), on the other. Then, we shall consider how Islam picked up and developed the Hellenic and Roman heritage, pagan and Christian, how it transmitted these to Latin Europe, and how the culture of the high Middle Ages was constructed in relation to what the Islamic world conveyed. Despite its pejorative origins, the notion of a “middle” age can serve us in characterising this period. In general, mediaevals are related to the ancients through the mediating “middle” of the religions and philosophical schools of Late Antiquity. The character of philosophy in the Middle Ages is indicative.
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This article sketches the most important shift in medieval religious history over the past few decades: the transition from ''church history'' to ''the history of religious culture.'' First, it surveys the field's expansion of ''the religious'' beyond a clerical elite to a broad demographic of the faithful, and its interest in devotion and lived experience in ways that have produced more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of Christian orthodoxy. Second, it sketches how the religions falling under the aegis of medieval religious history have increased from Latin Christianity only to Judaism, Islam, Greek Christianity, and even to forms of religiosity identified as pagan. Third, it argues that regardless of the field's many expansions and changes, scholars have tended not to make explicit the definitions of ''religion'' with which they work, and considers the ramifications and possible value of doing so.
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203. The Middle Ages after the Midde Ages: Popular Traditions and Medievalism, in Nada Zečević and Daniel Ziemann, eds., Oxford Handbook of Medieval Central Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 567-588
This chapter discusses a few examples of popular memories and various manifestations of revivals of interest in the-real or imaginary-Middle Ages during the last three centuries. Often connected to political agendas, those we address here are usually referred to as "medievalism. " 1 All this is just a small part of an issue that cannot be discussed here in detail that is called the "culture of memory, " which humans have always had to face, from deciding on burial customs in the Neolithic to handling the colonial or dictatorial past of much closer centuries. 2
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his course explores medieval history after the year 1000 to better understand the wide-ranging significance of the Middle Ages. Readings will include both primary source materials and research from important secondary studies, familiarizing students with some of the key documents from the period while exposing them to the best historiography on the subject. With a focus on holy wars and holy lands, the course presents and analyzes evolving scholarly interpretations of this era alongside an exciting array of primary sources from the Middle Ages. Themes: • Ideology: A set of shared beliefs, values, and practices. • Economics: The mobilization of labor; the extraction and exchange of the products of nature. • Military Power: The way in which societies organize concentrated lethal violence. • Political Power: The organization of social life under centralized, territorial regulation and the use of systems of governance.