Visual Heresy and Popular Religion in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

The founder of Christianity may have said that in his Father's house were many rooms, but his followers have persisted in the conviction that they should all live in the same one. This proclivity eventually led to the invention of heresy by the Church. In its attempts to define orthodoxy, heresy was created by natural consequence. By the end of the Middle Ages the social phenomena of heresy came to be perceived in manifestations of religious formation; intellectual revival, social evolution, civil disorder, protest, madness, disease, perversion, and certainly as the work of the devil. During the later Middle Ages popular religion began to play a key role in the defining of culture. It comes as no great surprise to learn that popular religion came to share a close affinity to heresy. In the past generation, historians have begun to realize more fully how much information the study of ordinary people living in ordinary circumstances can bring to the most fundamental historical questions. Political history can no longer be perceived as adequate in itself. The advances made in social, cultural and religious history, combined with intellectual and political history, provide a possible path towards the realization of 'total history'. Only when the implications and perhaps unintended consequences of an idea are examined in a concrete social context may the student of history begin to make any claim to understand it more fully.