Church and State

 In the US we believe in the separation of church and state.  It's written both into the Constitution and into law.  There is no state religion, and people are not told that they can or cannot follow a particular religion.  Employers (other than churches) cannot refuse to hire someone based solely on their religious beliefs.  And yet many people feel that their own beliefs ought to be enshrined in law.  How did we get here?  And hey! isn't this supposed to be a blog about the Middle Ages?

 

Of course it is.  To understand why our founders wanted to separate church and state, one has to look at history going back to the eighteenth century and, before then, back to the Middle Ages.  The American War of Independence was fought against England, where the king (or queen) was (and is) the official head of the English (Anglican) church.  The seventeenth-century pilgrims came to North America because they could not worship as they wanted back in England.  No wonder our founders wanted to ensure separation of church and state.  (Modern Britain has freedom of religion now, even though it still has a state church.)

England and the rest of Europe had had extensive religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as first Catholics and Protestants went to war with each other, then different Protestants with each other.  A semi pause in all the fighting was the idea that each ruler got to declare the religion for his territory, "Cuius regio, eius religio" (His region means his religion).  If you didn't like the local state religion, tough, move somewhere else.

(Some of my Protestant ancestors left the little German state where they lived because the ruler was Catholic. They settled in France, because at the time Protestants, called Huguenots, were tolerated.  When the French crown decided everyone had to be Catholic, their descendants moved to Ireland, where at the time the English crown encouraged Protestantism.  You can see where this is going.)

But how about the Middle Ages?  There the separation of church and state would have made no sense.  Part of the responsibility of a ruler was supposed to be to bring his people to God, and that was understood to be by making sure they followed the True Religion, whatever that was.

Now in the Middle Ages there was not the wide mix of different versions of Christianity we have now, with all the Protestant denominations and variations of Catholicism and orthodoxy.  Everyone in the medieval West was supposedly following the same version of Christianity.  Of course in practice there was lots of variation, as different areas might well be different without even realizing they were, and there were reasonably sized communities of Muslims and Jews in Europe, who alternated between being persecuted and being tolerated.  Western Catholicism supposedly was open to Greek Orthodoxy (and its variants, like Russian Orthodoxy), but Eastern and Western Christianity declared the other heretics in the eleventh century and never made up.

The apparent unity of western Europe's religion was indeed often broken by certain groups being declared heretical, that is (as it was understood then) following deviant Christianity even though they ought to have known better.  Heretics of course always believed they were the true Christians, and the other guys were the heretics.  The wars of northern France against southern France in the thirteenth century with the support of the crown, the Albigensian Crusade, were efforts to overcome heresy.  With examples like this from history, it's not surprising that America was founded on the idea of not imposing a religion on anyone.

In recent years this has become complicated by some people arguing that their religious freedom is violated by other people doing things that their own version of religion considers Wrong, and that laws allowing them to do so are oppressive on their own religious freedom.  Examples of countries like Iran, where there really is a state religion enforced on everybody, ought to give such folks pause.  Suppose they discovered they were the ones the state declared heretics?  The overall level of religious tolerance in the modern US (and modern Europe for that matter) has made it too easy to forget what can happen when church and state really are united.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval religious and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval orphans

 Medieval parents, like modern parents, loved their children (one sometimes hears that they didn't, but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of medieval society, as I have discussed previously).  But who is going to raise the children?

Even today an awful lot of children are not brought up in the stereotypical way, by Mom and Dad (married to each other of course).  Single parents and divorced parents are raising a lot of children.  But these days there aren't many widowed parents raising children.  With the much lower life expectancy of the Middle Ages,  on top of single parents and divorced parents, the chances were much lower of a child being raised by her two biological parents.

In the Italian Renaissance, for which we have at least some good glimpses into demography, children might lose a parent to the Black Death (a feature of the Renaissance) or another disease, have the surviving parent remarry, then lose the second biological parent, and end up being raised by a married couple, to neither of whom the child was related.

Because few medieval adults made it very far out of their 50s, there were an awful lot of orphans among adults, but it was the orphan children who were worried about.  One hears the phrase now, "It takes a village to raise a child," and medieval people certainly would have agreed with that.  Relatives would routinely take in a child who had lost his parents.  If there were no nearby relatives, neighbors would take in the child.

For the powerful, it was considered an appropriate act of charity to take in an orphan.  The child might end up doing menial chores, but that was true of all children unless they were the pampered heirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, Europe was underpopulated, and children were thus valuable.

Medieval Europe did not have orphanages or formal systems of fostering or adopting.  If one took in a child to raise, he was part of the family (though often on a lower rung than the biological children).  Romans had had formal adoption systems among the elite, intended to clarify inheritance, but medieval people did not bother with that.

For that matter, formal adoption processes are quite recent.  Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had "Homes" for orphans and abandoned children, including one large one in Nova Scotia.  If someone in the eastern part of the country wanted a boy or girl to help on the farm or around the house, they would send off to the Home and be sent one, pretty much no questions asked, no wait time or home inspections or anything.  In the Anne of Green Gables stories, Anne is a "home-girl," and she lucked out in ending up with the Cuthberts.  A lot of home-boys and home-girls essentially became servants, fed and clothed and given a place to sleep but certainly not paid.  Medieval orphans might well end up in a similar situation, but they would not first have to take a long train ride to somewhere they'd never been.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval families, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Failure of prophecy

 The other day the national emergency system was tested, with sirens and alerts sent to people's phones.  The announcement that it was coming was greeted with a whole panoply of wild conspiracy theories, primarily that the sound would trigger the microchip (or perhaps the evil virus) that the Covid-19 vaccine had supposedly planted in our bodies, thus either giving us all some dread disease or even (best yet!) turning us all into zombies.

Now of course hardly anyone was turned into a zombie, or not that you'd notice.  But the incident does raise an interesting issue:  What are the prophets supposed to do when prophecy fails?  This was a problem in the Middle Ages too, although then it was more likely based on some prophecy out of the Bible than on vaccines and zombies.

The failure of the zombie apocalypse the other day was met with extended discussions of why this wasn't actually a failure of prophecy.  The social media gurus who started the idea began by denying they had actually said it would happen right away (even though that was of course what they'd suggested, even if the words "right away" had not passed their lips -- or the keyboard on their phones). This was met with appropriate derision.

 Struggling to find respect, today's conspiracy prophets insisted that things really had turned out just as they said, except that the dread disease (or microchip) was going to take a few days, even a few weeks, for its effects to be felt.  Or perhaps the sirens had been set to a different frequency than that required to activate the microchip.  Maybe Homeland Security had been warned of the dangers of a zombie apocalypse and changed the sirens at the last moment!  yes, that's the answer!  We're heroes!  (More derision.)

Those predicting the end of the world in the Middle Ages (an issue that came up frequently, though curiously enough not in the year 1000, the year modern textbooks like to talk about) had to deal with similar concerns.  If you predict the world is about to end, and yet sure enough there it is the next day, hanging in there, you have to come up with some rational explanation.

One of the best responses was that God had seen all the faithful people who believed in the end of the world praying away, been touched by their faith, and changed His mind, figuring to give us another chance.  This meant the prophets could call themselves heroes, even if it did make God seem rather unsure of Himself, and it always failed to persuade those who hadn't believed in the end of the world originally.

Alternately prophets could claim the end really was coming, but their calculations had been a tiny bit off, they'd forgotten to carry the 2, next summer for sure!  This only works once.  The next time the prophecy fails people start getting suspicious of the prophets.

The strongest response was to say that the apocalypse really had happened, but only the select few were capable of noticing.  This actually works well for a small, core group of believers, who essentially have given up on recruiting anyone else to their cause.  (Though even they may become suspicious after a while.)

In the Middle Ages failed prophecies quickly became heresies.  Groups like the Cathars of twelfth-thirteenth-century southern France, heretics already, had numerous prophecies, often based around ideas of three ages of the world, with things changing mightily in the third.  (It could become complicated, some Cathar theologians had each age have three divisions of its own, so the beginning of the Third Age was also the beginning of the seventh smaller age, allowing more room for different signs and events.)  Being the only ones who believed the prophecies could draw a group labeled as heretical closer together.

But for most of the medieval population, including those who at least temporarily believed in the coming end of the world, the most common response was to go home and pretend they'd never believed in anything so silly.  One assumes that those who were preparing for the zombie apocalypse this week took a similar approach.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval religious and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.