*When The Western Catholic Church Was The Only Game In Town In Europe-Almost- A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Waldo Of Lyon mentioned below in this book review.

Book Review

Popular Religion In The Middle Ages, Rosalind And Christopher Brooke, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984

Back a goodly number of years ago now I began purchasing a number of books, including the one under review, “Popular Religion In The Middle Ages”, on the early history, ethos, and development of Western religions, essentially the Roman Catholic Church and its various off-shoots. My purpose for the purchases at that time was to begin to stockpile material so that when I reached an old enough age I would able to withdraw from the political struggles that animated my youth: the struggle against war, against racial and economic injustice, and various other worldly oppressions and study the social roots of religious expression, especially the primitive communal ones. I have, unfortunately, had to spend that old age continuing those same struggles from my youth but I have come to realize that if I want to get to those questions I had better dust off the old books and sneak some time to read about the old time religion.

I have, frankly, always been intrigued by those various primitive religion expressions that we can directly, in some way, link to the more secular, socialist consciousness of our day. The short-lived, besieged Anabaptist Commune at Muenster in the 1500s, written about long ago by the German Social Democratic leader and academic, Karl Kautsky, comes to mind, as does the medieval theological expression of that same phenomena, Waldo of Lyon and the Waldenese communities that suffered extreme persecution as heretics. Furthermore, I was interested in learning more about a half-forgotten old sect; the Cathars, also known as the Albigensian heretics.

Along the way the authors here investigate all that and also the relationship between the ignorant, illiterate lay masses and the sometimes equally ignorant clergy; the role of the bible, church buildings, church art and the like in bringing the message to the masses; the recurrence waves of piety that would spread over various social layers of society and produced a slew of isolated, otherworldly monasteries and convents; the rise of what we would call primitive capitalism in changing, for some, the way religion got expressed. Now this may seem like very specialized reading, and it is, although the authors here have dealt with that problem with a fairly light touch in this short medieval religion primer. And have provided many interesting pictorial illustrations as well.