ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors delineates and distinguishes the salient cultural characteristics of four more or less artificially constructed groups within late medieval and early modern European society. However, the three-orders model is useful not least in that it postulated that society was fundamentally a unity. Cultural differences between classes were also blunted by the fact that before the Enlightenment virtually all shared some kind of Christian belief, though it had different accents in different social classes. Patronage and clientage linked gentry and nobles to dependents further down the social scale. The appearance of the courtier as an ideal type was a major event in the growing divergence of popular and elite culture. One way or another, opportunities for inter-personal and inter-kin conflict abounded in peasant communities. Official sacramental theology could indeed be highly intricate, as with the concept of Transubstantiation accepted by the medieval Church.
