ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the literature on the social history of religion in the Middle Ages. The secularization theory in a crude form dominates thinking about religion in the world of great universities and, by contagion from them, the elite national media. Sociologists of religion are somewhat more precise in their definition of secularization: Religion no longer has the influence on society that it once did–often without specifying when "once" was. There is little reason to believe that the "old religions" survived as organized faiths. C. John Sommerville summarizes the difference between the Middle Ages and modern times by saying that before the Reformation, England had a religious culture, and after the Reformation, religious faith. The phenomenon of the traveling religious enthusiast, in the later Middle Ages perhaps a Franciscan or Dominican friar suggests that there was both a religious hunger among the peasants and a sense of an uncompleted task among churchmen.