Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature (review)

This is a broad and deeply researched study, but also a carefully limited one. Bernadette Filotas wants to examine popular religion and culture across five centuries, from roughly 500 to 1000, or, as she neatly puts it, from the episcopacy of Caesarius of Arles to that of Burchard of Worms. Caesarius, in her view, did much to “set the tone” for later Christian authorities’ encounters with popular culture (p. 1), while Burchard, in his Decretum, provided something of a capstone to a certain kind of cultural interaction. By the beginning of the eleventh century, most of the lands of western Europe had been Christianized or re-Christianized. That is, the cultural dominance of Roman Christianity had been reasserted after an influx of Germanic peoples. Filotas acknowledges that these dates, like so much else concerning the complex process of early medieval Christianization, could be the subject of fierce debate, but rather than defend her choice of periodization ad nauseam, she simply (and wisely) states her case and moves on.

She is equally efficient in dispatching the various problems that swirl around the notion of “popular” religion or culture. Was there, in fact, a distinct “popular culture” in this period, essentially pagan and folkish, wholly separate from the Christian and classical culture of governing elites? Despite her title, Filotas does not think so. She recognizes that folkloric and quasi-pagan elements interwove themselves through all levels of early medieval society in a multitude of complex ways. Yet she suggests that “popular” culture is a convenient shorthand for those cultural elements that authorities identified as separate from legitimate Christian culture, generally ascribing to them pagan origins, and thus subjecting them to censure and condemnation. Across the five centuries with which she is concerned, Christian authors repeatedly discussed the same sorts of illicit beliefs and practices. In their writings, they constructed a separate, “popular” culture even if no such entity ever truly or fully existed.

This is a study rigorously restricted to its source base. Filotas has chosen to survey the pastoral literature of the early Middle Ages because, while she recognizes its often prescriptive nature, she nevertheless holds that it was “the only form of literature concerned directly, if seldom, with the beliefs and rituals of ordinary men and women” (p. 9). The breadth of the literature surveyed is impressive. The annotated listing of primary sources at the end of the book runs to no less than twenty pages (pp. 365–84). Yet all of these sources, she notes, contain only about two thousand mostly brief passages dealing with the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. In the end, for five centuries and all the lands of western Europe, this is not much to go on, and Filotas also notes the staggering array of aspects of common life never touched on by any of these sources. In her words, “the routine of daily life is almost wholly absent: cooking and brewing magic, magic to restore virginity and to determine the sex of babies, the rituals of pregnancy, childbirth and puberty.” We learn nothing about “charcoal burners, wood-cutters, miners, fishermen, sailors (a notoriously superstitious crew), smiths (with their strongly magical antecedents), potters, tanners, wheelwrights, peddlers, beggars, thieves and prostitutes” (p. 359).

In the end, this book is really (and probably necessarily) a study of the concerns of early medieval churchmen regarding what they viewed as superstitious, often pagan elements persisting in their society, rather than a study of that society directly. And here we come to the heart of Filotas’s limitation. The repeatedly stated concerns of churchmen are only a useful source for the study of popular religion if one accepts that they at least somewhat accurately reflect real beliefs or practices. Many scholars are extremely skeptical of this, noting how strongly earlier sources (for example, the sermons of Caesarius of Arles) influenced later ones. They see in all of this material not a...