Being a Christian in the Middle Ages. Review on: Jean Verdon «Être chrétien au Moyen Âge» (Paris, 2018)

Pavel Valentinovich Krylov PhD in history, leading researcher, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History (Petrozavodskaya ulitsa, 7, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 197110)
pavel_kryloff@mail.ru

Krylov P. V. Being a Christian in the Middle Ages. Review on: Jean Verdon «Être chrétien au Moyen Âge» (Paris, 2018), Religiya. Tserkov’. Obshchestvo. Issledovaniya i publikatsii po teologii i religii [Religion. Church. Society: Research and publications in the field of theology and religious studies], Saint-Petersburg, 2019, vol. 8, pp. 406–411

doi: 10.24411/2308-0698-2019-00019

Language: Russian

The review analyses the  book of  the French historian-medievalist and religious scholar Jean Verdon, dedicated to the religious everyday life of the Western Middle Ages. It is shown that the author creates a picture of the life of European society at that stage of development, when every man from his or her birth till death, obeyed the Roman Catholic Church. The author demonstrates excellent knowledge of the narrative and documentary sources, making his own text more bright, and his research appears quite reliable because of the statistical calculations. The narration develops according to a strict plan, and the reader receives information on a chain of questions: how a newborn Christian was taken into fellowship with the Church; how the parish was arranged; what instructions it received; how the church year and other time periods and cycles were arranged; how the Church influenced on the family life; what veneration of shrines, prayer, repentance and charity were on practice; how the Church institutions formulated and transmitted to a believer social ideals and directed him to holiness. The only serious drawback of the monograph is clearly complimentary attitude to the Church institutions, whose role in the humanization of a wide range of  human relationships, in  particular in  preaching of  the ideas of social piece, the author constantly emphasizes. In addition, Jean Verdon avoids expressing opinions regarding the Church proceedings and court, in particular the Inquisition. The book may be recommended to anyone interested in history of religion and problems of religious daily routine.

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Key words: Robert Ciboule, Eudes de Sully, everyday life, community, prayers, sermons, The Great Schism

URL: http://rcs-almanac.ru/en/krylov-2019-en/

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