Popular Religion in the High Middle Ages

Well, I’ve gotten about 8 pages written at this point, which is barely half of what I wanted to accomplish by this weekend, but it’s a start. This just means I’ll have to work over Thanksgiving break. I feel at times like I’m not making enough of a point with what I’m saying, but I’m really just letting it develop and seeing where things go. I haven’t written a real intro yet, and sections need better transitions, but I feel like it’s working towards something, though I’m not quite sure what that something is yet. I’m also running across the problem that, because I intend to introduce my sources and my methodology in my introductory chapter, I keep worrying that it’s not making sense. It’s more my own psychological issue than a real problem, since I will eventually do that, it’s just that so much of my argument rests on justifying my methodology that it makes me uneasy. I have a good feeling about everything though. And it’s all so interesting. I just wrote a section on necromancy, for which I read a short article suggesting that Jesus was accused of necromancy, of having possessed first a demon and then the resurrected spirit of John the Baptist to perform his miracles. Ancient and medieval conceptions of the supernatural are just so fascinating. I could just go on and on about it, and hopefully will go on and on about it in the rest of my thesis.

Literally, every project I had to do for my other classes was due today, plus the regular homework and a Latin quiz, plus my mom visited…so, needless to say, I did not get anything done on my thesis this weekend. I did, however, begin writing a little bit on Thursday; I organized my ideas a little more and wrote about a page. But the upside is that now it’s all finished, and the thesis should be the only thing I have to worry about for the rest of the semester. My goal is to average two pages a day for the next few weeks, and more if I can, which makes it totally manageable and non-stressful. I am a bit concerned, though, about having enough material to fill 25 pages. I have quite a bit of primary material, and stuff to say about it and to make connections and all that, but I don’t really have any other secondary studies to go along with it. I’m not really sure if it’s necessary yet, but I may need to try to find some just in case.

I just completed the best registration period of my life. Everything went through really quickly, I got everything I wanted, and it was absolutely glorious. It’s really only fitting though considering that I’ve gotten majorly screwed over at every previous registration.

As far as my thesis, I’m actually feeling pretty good about things, though maybe I should be panicking a little. I haven’t started writing yet, but I’ve got a lot of notes organized by topic now and I think tomorrow I’ll be fitting them into an outline and maybe even starting to write. I’m usually a pretty fast writer once I have everything organized well, but writing is agonizingly slow for me if I don’t plan well enough, so I think taking the time now to get it all laid out is the best plan. Unfortunately, I have a bunch of little projects for my other classes that I have to do over the next two weeks that will get in the way, but what can you do.

[P.S. - Prof. Hoak's last lecture is Wednesday night at 7 in the Wren Great Hall. He's a really wonderful prof who's retiring this year and you all should definitely come!]

Coming up with the outline for class today really made me think about how this project is going to come together.  I had conceived already of a chapter on demons, but I hadn’t really decided what the other chapters should be or how they should be structured.  I’m still really struggling with figuring out how to work in all these various themes while keeping it cohesive and not being repetitive.  I’m also horribly bad at outlining in general, and it’s usually not something I do until right before I write a particular section.  I sometimes have a tendency to be a perfectionist, but because there is still so much time left for the project as a whole, I’m going to do my best to just write and get words on the page, keeping in mind that there will be plenty of time to fix everything.

I think I’ve decided to write the chapter on demons and saints for Research Methods.  It’s the middle chapter in the very rough configuration of chapters I’ve assembled so far, and it’s also what I forsee as being the longest chapter.  There’s just so much stuff on demons and saints; I’ve envisioned it as the backbone of my thesis.  I still have so much work to do though.  When reading through my sources for the first time I was really lax about taking good notes, so now I have pages of notebooks here and there with brief notes on them that I have to go back and read again and type them up into my notetaking program, which is a huge undertaking.  I’ll probably do some more work on that for the next day or two and then start organizing all my little examples under their appropriate outline headings to start writing.

After class last week, I started thinking about what gaps in the research I could be filling in with my own work. I thought about how the scholarship had developed since since secularization of religious history around about mid-century; it seemed to have swung from a vision of a Golden Age of catholicism to one of a deeply folkloric and superstitious congregation who could only conceive of Christianity in terms surviving from paganism, before equalizing out somewhere in between. Scholars have alternately argued for a popular culture that was rather monolithic and unchanging across the centuries and for one that exhibits more regional peculiarities that developed over time.  Clerical culture, however, always seems to be assumed to be rather uniform; sure, anyone would admit that the parish priest was no Thomas Aquinas, but in the studies of popular religion I’ve read, scholars tend to speak of a clerical culture that is “literate”, “elite”, and “learned”, but that is never clearly articulated, or examined for any nuances.  But I think my sources point to a clerical culture that has much in common with popular culture, which is something Gurevich touched on here and there, but never went into any great detail.  I think Caesarius has ample evidence for this, both explicitly in his tales and implicitly in their composition.  I’ve also found a new source I’d like to incorporate that highlights problems among the clergy that I think point to them sharing a common culture with laypeople: the Registers of Eudes of Rouen, a 13th century Franciscan who recorded his visitations to monasteries and cathedral chapters around France.  I think it could serve well to bolster the arguments based in Caesarius.  Hopefully my adviser agrees when we meet sometime this week and we can figure out some way for me to organize all of this before Monday.  For now I’ll be reading about the Blessed Virgin and incontinent priests.

 I’m really grateful that we had to do this book review; I probably wouldn’t have read all of Gurevich’s book otherwise, but I’m glad I did. Before class today I printed out all of my typed up notes on secondary literature and read through them again, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of what the arguments have been and how the scholarship has developed. There are some scholars, like Gabriel Le Bras, Etienne Delaruelle, Jean Delumeau, who are mentioned in almost everything I read, but I question the usefulness of reading them myself. Everyone today seems to be arguing against them for the most part, and I think I’ll probably just mention their arguments through the summaries in other people’s works. It would be nice to be able to read EVERYTHING, but in reality I think reading a whole book just to include a brief mention of its argument in the introduction isn’t worth the time at this point. The main thing I’m concerned with right now is just figuring out where the gaps are and where I can contribute something new to the conversation. Hopefully I can figure that out before the outline is due.

[As an addendum: To make up for past laziness, I've scheduled eight hours of thesis research for tomorrow.  We'll see how it goes.]

I honestly did nothing over fall break.  In the week leading up to the break, I just kept reading through Caesarius, and I think I’m starting to notice some trends that I could pick up in my thesis, though I’m not sure how to work everything together yet.  I still need to gather some corroborating bits from other sources, which I’ll probably do when the book review is done.  Since getting back I’ve started going back through the Gurevich book on which I’m doing the review.  It’s a bit daunting that I have so much to read in the next couple days (I want to be done with it by Saturday), but I think in this case procrastination will pay off because reading it all at once will make it easier to see the book and its arguments as a whole, more so than if I read a chapter every couple days and then tried to consider it all together later.

So, there are two weeks left in October.  That should be plenty of time to get through all of the primary source material I have and hopefully to find some more stuff to integrate.

I just had another meeting with my advisor.  He assured me that confusion and lack-of-direction are appropriate feelings for October and that I seem to be on track, so that’s comforting.  This week I’ve just been reading more Caesarius of Heisterbach and trying to decide what to do with my other sources.  I think I’ve decided that Caesarius will be my main source, which I think is appropriate considering that he’s rarely used in scholarship on popular religion, he’s meticulous about citing the sources of all of his stories, and there’s a substantial amount of material here.  Then I think I’ll just kind of pepper in support from various other sources that are less accessible because of language and publication issues (and have generally been cited more often in existing scholarship).  My advisor and I also discussed which book I should choose for the book review, and we decided that Aron Gurevich’s Medieval Popular Culture, though difficult to review because it’s a collection of loosely-related articles, arguably contains some of the most important arguments with which I’ll need to engage in my thesis.  So the next week will hopefully see me (at least nearly) finish a once-over of Caesarius and start delving back into Gurevich’s work.

This week I’ve mainly just been slogging through Caesarius of Heisterbach, trying to get a feel for what I’m working with.  It really upsets me that there is no translation anywhere for Etienne de Bourbon, but I do have a few random translations of some of his work, so I guess I could try to incorporate that.  I’m still trying to figure out just what I want to do with all this, and still trying to find other sources to use with Caesarius.  I still haven’t decided if I want to try to do something comparative across time periods or stick to the thirteenth century; it all kind of depends on what I can find in a language that I can read (pretty much only English or French).  I really, really wish my Latin and German were better, it would help so much right now!  I have some good prospects that I’m going to check out at Swem tomorrow, though, so I may have more to update then.

I didn’t accomplish a whole lot this past week, and I really have no valid excuse for that.  I’ve tried to set up a schedule where I can spend Monday and Wednesday nights, when I don’t have a lot of time, just getting homework done for my classes on those days, and then spend all day Tuesday and Thursday, when I don’t have classes, working on my thesis, but it never seems to turn out that way.  The main reason is just pure laziness, and that knowing I have “all day” to work leads to a lot of time being wasted.  But this week I am determined to turn this around and set a definite schedule for myself to follow!

What I did accomplish last week was to read a few more articles that have just reiterated everything I’ve already read as far as how the historiography has developed and what the current methodological concerns are, and I went back through all the articles I’ve already read but for which I hadn’t yet typed up notes.  I’ve also been backing up all my notes on Google Documents, just importing the Word docs in case something happens to my laptop.  It’s also convenient to be able to access them anywhere if I decide I need to look at something.

I’m really itching to start reading Caesarius of Heisterbach again, with what I think is a new-found focus on what to look for.  I also want to start rereading Lester Little’s book Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe to help me keep in mind how what I’m finding ties into larger societal shifts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the rise of urban areas and the mendicant friars.  I would like to explore how urban development affected what the preachers were saying and how they formulated their sermons and stories, maybe by comparing Caesarius of Heisterbach with an early medieval text.  Aron Gurevich cites a few, like Caesarius of Arles and Gregory the Great, to argue for continuity across the middle ages, but more recent research tends to stress the variety of popular beliefs and practices across time and in different locations, so I have a feeling that a close analysis of the texts could reveal some key differences in the way popular preachers explained and framed Christian beliefs.  I haven’t talked to my advisor about this possible direction, but I hope to figure out its feasibility in the next week or two.