Religious thought and practice influenced vast areas of social life, profoundly impacting adherents’ consciousness. Indeed, the modern state would eventually have to absorb many of the church’s functions. In the medieval period, moral, social, and what we would today call political thought all took place almost exclusively within religious institutions. Terry Eagleton has argued that no such hegemonic force could exist in modern society and that capitalist societies have struggled in vain to fill the vacuum left by religion. [...]
Economic crisis convulsed Europe in the late medieval period. By 1300, a growing rural population began to exceed the traditional feudal plots’ capacity. Food prices increased with grain shortages, and displaced peasants fled their traditional agricultural roles to cities, where they worked as wage laborers. The increase in available workers drove down pay.
The climate changed, becoming cooler and wetter, contributing to famines across large swaths of Western Europe between 1315 and 1317, killing between 10 and 15 percent of the population. [...]
These crises changed the patterns of economic and social life. Between 1375 and 1400, as many as a quarter of the villages in German-speaking territories ceased to exist, as collapsing prices for agricultural products forced rural workers into wage labor. Nature reclaimed the land farmers had cleared for cultivation in previous centuries. [...]
Typically, radical reform movements opposed clerical wealth and corruption. They used independent readings of the gospel to establish their authority, making them fundamentalist in the true sense of the word: they eschewed traditional religious thought and practice in order to return to the essential elements of worship. They often foregrounded rebellious clergy, who broke from church hierarchy and continued to provide intellectual leadership to militants from lower social classes.
Crucially, these movements tended to divide into moderate and radical wings. Starting with a demand to reform or abolish certain church practices or rituals, segments of these organizations eventually radicalized into millenarian cults that called for the destruction of the existing social order.
No comments:
Post a Comment