THE SENSE OF CLOSENESS BETWEEN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT

It has become customary to speak of the faith or piety of the people or of the masses and to posit a distinction between this and the religious notions of the educated, in particular of the clergy and the lay élite. According to this view popular religiosity was suffused with archaic, numinous, pre- Christian elements, which had long been excluded from the church by the early councils and popes. As an example of this we need only mention the veneration of stones, trees, and waters, or the fear of witches and demons. Credulity in respect of the legends of the saints, of miracles, and of the effects of relics is also often taken to be a sign of ‘popular’ religion. More recently there has been a cautious reaction against this view, seen for example in the following quotation from Raoul Manselli (though he too is concerned with ‘popular religion’ in the middle ages): ‘it would in our opinion be a fundamental methodological error to conceive of popular religion as having been something quite different from learned religion’. It is indeed an error to separate popular religion or popular piety from a theoretically more or less enlightened religion. How could medieval religion have been differentiated according to social position or education? To suppose that it could is to project the ideas of the Enlightenment back into the middle ages.