E-Books →The Making of Lay Religion in Southern France, c. 1000–1350

Using an array of different historical documents, John H. Arnold explores the material contexts of Christian worship from the eleventh through to the fourteenth centuries, the shifting episcopal expectations of the ordinary laity, the changes wrought through wider socioeconomic developments, and periods of sharp inflection brought by the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath. Throughout, the book explores the complex spectrum of lay piety, finding enthusiasms and doubts, faith and scepticism, agency and negotiation. It explores not just developments in the content of faith for the laity but the very dynamics of belief as a lived experience. We are shown how across these key centuries Christianity developed in its external practices, but also via inculcating a more interiorized and affective mode of belief; and thus, it is argued, it can be said to have become truly a 'religion' - a structured, demanding, and rewarding faith - for the many and not just the few.