Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This reflective essay focuses upon the theoretical problem of explaining religious change in medieval and early modern Europe without perpetuating inherited paradigms of progress and modernization. First, it assesses and challenges prevailing models of periodization through an analytical overview of recent historiographical interpretations of four interconnected processes: conversion and Christianization, reform and reformation, “disenchantment” and desacralization, and religious persecution and pluralization. Secondly, it examines the consequences of the range of methodological approaches and conceptual frameworks adopted by scholars of these topics, together with the impact of interdisciplinary tendencies and influences. Thirdly, it explores the strengths and weaknesses of thinking less in terms of linear historical development than in terms of a series of cycles of religious change. A critical theme underpinning the discussion is the insight that the epistemological conventions that shape our understanding of the past are the product of the very religious and intellectual movements that are the subject of our study.

Religious Conflict among Pentecostal Churches in Uganda

“…During the middle ages, Christianity experienced some of the worst intra-religious conflicts ever, which were political as well as religious in character (Whalen, 2015). These were facilitated by ideological and cultural rupture in the medieval church (Walsham, 2014). For example, the inter-church conflict between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, also called the Great Schism, was a struggle for power and dominance between the two most important churches in Christendom, leading to a split of the once united church into two Christian halves; the Roman Catholic church in west and the Greek orthodox church in the east (Howard, 2012).…”

“…Protestant reformers presented their movement not as a novel departure, but as a revival of apostolic Christianity which had been suffocated and corrupted by the medieval papacy and ecclesiastical hierarchy. They claimed that the Church of Rome had buried and perverted the truth of the Gospel (Walsham, 2014). This led to evolution of diverse protestant churches; some of which were 'national' in character while others were 'evangelical' in ideology.…”