But this vision is false. By far the majority of the medieval population was at least nominally Christian, as is also the case today in the US and the UK, but this did not mean that their Christianity was anything simple, or that its church enforced certain beliefs on everyone.
To begin, for most of the Middle Ages no one really knew or cared what most of the population believed. There were no parish churches in rural villages before the twelfth century, so although it was expected that people would come into town to have new babies baptized, church attendance was by no means universal. Many chronicles took it for granted that the ordinary townspeople and the peasantry would mock the Church and the saints.
One twelfth-century chronicle describes a relic-tour: the monks needed to rebuild their church and took the relics of their saint on tour, asking for donations wherever they stopped and displayed the relics. In one town, an ugly crowd approached them, saying, "Ha, if your saint is so powerful, let's see a miracle!" Then they all laughed. The monks, terrified, prayed desperately, and to their own shock, as well as that of the crowd, a miracle actually happened (a person healed).
The author of this chronicle was of course trying to demonstrate the power of the saint, but he also assumed that his audience would recognize skeptical townspeople as normal.
There are still plenty of medieval churches scattered across modern Europe, far more than are required for the religious needs of a population now much bigger than the medieval population. (This is why a number are now ruined or serving other functions, like the theater pictured above.) But a whole lot of these churches were not set up for the ordinary population, but rather were churches where monks or canons prayed, withdrawn from the world.
If there is one aspect of the "age of faith" vision which is true, it is that far more medieval people entered the church than is the case today. There are extremely few monasteries in the US or Europe now, but medieval Europe was full of them--and, from the twelfth century on, nunneries for women multiplied as well. Although these churches did not serve as parish churches, pilgrims and tourists would frequently visit. It is estimated that perhaps 10% of the male aristocratic population entered the church, even though, of course, there was no "rule," about doing so, and some families sent no sons to the church at all, while others might have everyone convert to the religious life.
The aristocrats and well-to-do merchant families who sent sons to the church produced highly-educated men (and some women) who sought to apply the logic of the ancient Greeks to their own religion. No one at the time thought the Bible should just be read literally. It was of course to them the word of God, and therefore it deserved special attention, but this attention meant having to deal with the contradictions within it (especially between the Old Testament and the New) and the fact that medieval people who considered themselves good Christians were not following Jesus's explicit command to come join him preaching and wandering barefoot around the Sea of Galilee.
So the Bible could certainly be read literally in part (the Old Testament Fathers were real, Jesus's birth and miracles and resurrection were real, and so on), but other parts were to be read morally (urging good behavior), allegorically (so the love poems of the Song of Solomon became a metaphor of Christ's love for His church), or anagogically (so that events of the Old Testament that seemed to make little sense, like Abraham being told to sacrifice his son, were read as prefiguring Christian events, here God sacrificing His Son).
Thus in the supposed Age of Faith, no one worried too much about the majority of the population's rather superficial religion, and the educated leaders of the church devoted themselves to critical analysis of what they sought to believe.
Note: The Spanish Inquisition began after the Middle Ages were over. The only time peasant beliefs were a cause for real concern was in southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, when an Inquisition (not Spanish though) was begun to try to root out the heresy that had been the excuse for the Crusade.
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more on medieval religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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