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In the period following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire up to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the episcopate everywhere in Europe experienced substantial and important change, brought about by a variety of factors: the pressures of ecclesiastical reform; the devolution and recovery of royal authority; the growth of papal involvement in regional matters and in diocesan administration; the emergence of the "crowd" onto the European stage around 1000 and the proliferation of autonomous municipal governments; the explosion of new devotional and religious energies; the expansion of Christendom's borders; and the proliferation of new monastic orders and new forms of religious life, among...
Religion. For thousands of years this thing has dictated which people should live and which people should die, what shape our buildings should have or what colors our garments should contain, what food people should eat or what words people should speak. If religion is the opium of the masses, then beliefs about the end of the world are like overdoses. People touched by such beliefs no longer rely on a hidden, personal and intimate god, contemplated upon from the safe distance of the beating human heart. They live with the promise of divine intervention at a grand scale on the current coordinates of space and time. This can be an exceptional motivator and a game changer in terms of civil obedience, both at an individual and collective level. In the name of an immediate and palpable deity people can commit shocking cruelties. However, such belief can also account for some of the most exceptional social developments in human history.
Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, ...
Presents a coherent picture of this multifaceted man with an emphasis on his political alliances and the political considerations that colored his earliest biographical treatment.
This volume offers eight approaches to myth, its uses and purposes, from viewing personal narrative as a form of healing myth to observing the atrocities committed daily arising from the most destructive form of myth. The authors of the eight chapters here note that myths have existed from the beginning of the human race in a myriad of forms and serving a myriad of functions. Indeed, the shared observation of these scholars is that humans have always been storytellers and always will be because myths are a part of the lives of every single person; they are the story of us.
Dominique Barthélemy presents a sharply revisionist account of the history of France around the year 1000, challenging the traditional view that France underwent a kind of revolution at the millennium which ushered in feudalism.
In every belief system spiritual entities have been labeled as good if they have acted in favor to people and as evil if they have threatened their existence. Furthermore, protective actions and dangerous actions have been classified as such based on the beholder’s level of understanding of order and chaos. Evil entities spread chaos that endangers people’s existence, while good entities create order that preserves human life.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.