Jason Carr
November 14, 1992

Southern's Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages.


It was immediately obvious to me that Southern was not out to amuse his readers. 
Even his Preface, where one usually finds a bit of personality, there was no
glimmer here.

EARLY PERIOD:  (primitive age)

      Southern's treatment of holy relics caused me rethink my assessment of
them.  Previously I thought of relics as evidence that the people's faith was
somehow flawed, weak.  (in the manner, perhaps, of the modern congregations
who require miracles and healings in order to believe).  I now consider them
fetishes, objects of lasting value, able to confer authority.  Their martyrial or
holy origins free them from the usual material tainting shared by all other
objects in a dual  (manichean?) system.  




MIDDLE PERIOD (age of growth)

      The idea of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a gild is a useful tool.  Don't
know if that is a unique treatment, but it certainly was new to me.  (page 39)



LATE PERIOD (age of unrest):

Population growth 3X in this period.  Increasing farm tech?  Plows?  Anybody
know.  (page 46) 

THE SEARCH FOR REUNION:

The 1054 reunion attempts and the effect on future crusades are not always
stressed, but this would appear to be an important part of this history.  

PAPACY

Southern handles the Donation of Constantine in a way similar to that of the
relics.  To us it is vulgar, to the contemporaries it was a way of correcting
nature, of simplifying reality.  (who said that god had his own truth, separate
from man.)

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

1100 is a convenient pivot on which to hang the complication of Western Society
and the proliferation of religious orders.  

The pithy narratives of  the conversions of Dominic and Francis of Assisi were
well put together, and will lend themselves to remembering the different orders.


Also interesting was the role of friar orders in the university.  The academics
could distance themselves from political jockeying and benefices by joining an
order.  Can you still do that?

For about a year now I have been tossing around the idea of a university
position as a sort of secular priesthood.  Or perhaps that the priesthood and
academia both refer to a type, a Nazirite of some sort.  Or perhaps a beguine.



314 Conrad of marchtal quote -- knew my ex-wife!


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