Gone Medieval - How to be an Atheist in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

We tend to think that it was impossible not to subscribe to Christianity in the Middle Ages. But, as in any age, belief can wax and wane. But the chroniclers of the period largely ignored the voices of ordinary people, whose faith may not have been quite so devout as we have been led to believe.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega talks to Dr. Alec Ryrie, author of Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, which charts how atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Eleanor Yonaga and in today's episode we'll be talking about atheists in medieval Europe, how to see unbelief and why we often like to think that atheists are a product of the modern world. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Alec Riry. He is the professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University where he works on themes including the emotional history of religion,

the intersection of religion and politics, war, violence, and martyrdom. His latest book is Unbelievers in Emotional History of Doubt, which will be informing our discussion today. So, Alec, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me. I guess I'm going to have to start us off for something that is both a very easy question, kind of simple, but very difficult in the complexity of it. So for the most difficult question of all time,

Could you just describe the religious climate of medieval Europe? You know, just a thousand years of history. Could you describe that? Sure. Yeah, just a sentence, so too. We're talking about this quite weird phase in the long history of Christianity. And it's worth emphasizing how weird it is because those of us living in the post-medieval world, as we all do, have come to see it as normal. There's been this sort of deep sense since the Protestant Reformation. that something has broken in the religious culture of the West

and we need to get back to it. I think that sense of medieval worlds as this ideal still lurks there. What makes it so exceptional is that for the best part of a thousand years, you have a culture in the Latin West where there is one overwhelmingly dominant religious culture. That's a culture that comes to articulate

and define itself much more clearly as the period goes on. But compared to virtually every other place and time in history of Christianity, you don't have self-consciously opposed groups that are major options that are anathematizing one another as heretics. You also don't have large numbers of non-Christians mixed in with the Christian population. Of course, there is a is a persistent and quite numerically significant Jewish population, and there's Muslims at various frontier points, and especially in the north and east, and especially earlier in the period, you've still got significant populations who don't identify as Christians. Nevertheless, I mean, with all those provisors in place, you're dealing with an unusually religiously

homogenous group, at least in terms of identity. Within that homogeneity, there's a huge amount of variety, but it's a walled garden, and the great majority of the population belong in some sense to that community, which is policed formally and informally within itself, but is not having to deal with large-scale external rivals. As I said, really unusual, bizarre situation for Christians to find themselves in, but it lasts for so long in that setting that it comes to seem normal and expected. I think that's a really great way of putting it. And, you know, I think in many ways, when we talk about medieval Europe, if that's indeed what we're talking about, what we're saying is, oh, the point in time when the Roman church is the dominant religion and there are no major

inflection points other than that. I kind of struggle whenever anyone always says to me, oh, when does the medieval period end? And I'm kind of like, oh, and one of the things that I always sort of say is when you have things that are not Catholic. So since I work on Bohemia, I'm like, Hussites. The minute there are Hussites around, then certainly you've gone to. But I think certainly we can say Protestants, that's one way of doing it. So, I mean, having said all this, how did the dominance of the church then shape societal norms, right? So if you have this big religious structure, what does that mean in terms of religious belief, but on a cultural level? Okay, now we are getting to the hard questions.

I know, I know. I guess the way I'd want to approach that is to say that the church is both very strong and superfluing. surprisingly weak at the same time in different ways. It's got access to all the formal structures of power. There's very few spaces in which it's possible to be explicitly or outspokenly opposed to Christianity and indeed to the church itself. The two are not quite the same thing. There's some slippage, but they're pretty closely identified. But the way that we would think about that in terms of a modern society where the structures of power reach much more deeply into individual lives. It can be misleading. These are not totalitarian societies. They don't aspire

to be, they couldn't conceive of being so. And so the church as an institution, despite having this enormous level of social and cultural power, can feel itself to be powerless. I mean, when you look at one of the most famous inflection points, the Fourth Lateran Council at the beginning of the 13th century, where they're laying down some of these key requirements for Christians across the territories that recognize papal authority. And it's that every Christian should confess their sins to a priest and receive communion once a year, that there should be a sermon in every parish four times a year. You know, I mean, this is pretty minimal.

They've got the overarching structure, but to actually reach down into ordinary people's lives remains enormously difficult. And it's a cliche that during the counter-reformation in the late 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, that Catholic reformers are repeatedly shocked to discover how little Christianity, according to their own rather idealistic standards, they're actually encountering in the villages and hamlets of Western Europe. So Europe is converted to Christianity in the early medieval period to the extent that most of Most political leaders have formally embraced it. Bishop Bricks have been established. A parish network slowly begins to be built up.

People are accepting the Christian sacraments and are professing Christianity, but actually reaching this process down into real people's lives is a very slow business. And one of the things that drives the dramas of the Reformation in the 16th century and afterwards is a widespread feeling that really the process is, scarcely begun, and that this professedly Christian world just ain't so. It's a quite funny thing, isn't it? Because you see people constantly complaining about this. You know, it's a thing that preachers bring up constantly, especially in the 14th century, but how really not everyone is very Catholic. And really, if you talk to the average peasant,

all they can do is say, the Our Father, and they don't understand that they should be doing so much more. They should be taking all these things on board. And I think that really strikes us as modern people as really strange because we think about the church being this overriding institution, that it's kind of like police under your bed and the moment you do something wrong, the church is going to spring out and kind of control everything, but that's not always the case, right? It's a long process. It's not just that they don't have the resources to enforce that kind of conformity or the personnel to provide that sort of teaching. It's simply in a conceptually different universe to be able to produce that. And I think that

there's a slippage here, which is important between what the theologians might in the abstract aspire to and what could ever be possible for any society. You can see even in proper totalitarian societies, you will see the same kind of anxieties, even though there's much more effective propaganda to push ideas down into ordinary people's lives and to enforce conformity and to punish deviance. Nevertheless, the fear that these things which ought to animate every soul to excite each individual believer as they excite the preachers, and yet it's not happening. In some ways, what you're dealing with is the problem of how a sectarian grouping that has gone from being this small persecuted minority and spends its first three centuries developing in that form,

and has then suddenly, disconcertingly suddenly, founded itself with the reins of power. And it still never properly worked out how this voluntary sectarian religion can function as a universal religion. Okay, so I guess getting to the atheism bit, which I promised everyone, you know. So here we are in this world that is, at least on paper,

supposed to be being controlled by a really powerful church. But how then are we different? defining atheism, you know, people who don't believe in a medieval context. I mean, it certainly has to differ from our understanding of atheists today. I mean, we don't even really have a word for atheism, do we, at the time? No, I think that it's worth being clear that the word atheist does not exist in a European language throughout the medieval period. It's first coined in Latin in 501, I believe. In origin, of course, it's a Greek term. It's widely used in the ancient world, both by pagans and Christians. But the meaning the ancient Greeks would have meant when they

call people atheoi is different from what is meant in the early modern or modern world when you call people atheists. When that word is translated into Latin in the ancient world, it's translated as impius, which I think is helpful. Of course, literally, etymologically, an atheist is somebody who is without God or without the gods. Maybe the best modern English equivalent to it would be to call somebody godless. So this is not principally, although it's always got that element to it, it's not principally about metaphysical claims, about whether you are postulating the existence or non-existence of a deity. It's much more about your moral status. When early Christians are, as they often are, accused of being atheists, it's.

partly because they are denying the existence of the pagan gods or claiming that they're demons rather than gods. But it's mostly because of the moral shock that they represent, that they're defying social, cultural, religious norms by refusing to accept one set of religious norms and embracing something that's shockingly different instead. And so in that sense, they truly are from a pagan perspective, atheist, in that they are godless. They are rejecting that whole structure. And the fact that they are also very clearly affirming theism of their own doesn't excuse them from that charge. So when both sides in the ancient worlds, Christian and pagan are denouncing one another as atheist, in a sense they are both right.

The closest you get to that sort of philosophical articulation of something that we might call atheism of unbelief is in the figure of the stock atheist or unbelief. unbeliever who is used in scholastic disputation. I mean, Anselm is the most famous, probably the most significant exemplar of this. In the proslogion is where he lays out his famous ontological argument for the being of God, and in that text, and then subsequently writes this as a dialogue with a figure who, in modern translations, is often described as the atheist, who is explicitly arguing that there is no God, which in the terms that Anselm's readers would have immediately understood makes him a fool because of the line repeated a couple

of time in the Psalms that the fool that says in his heart that there is no God. So the very fact that that text is there tells you that the idea of somebody who says that there is no God is current. It makes sense to them. But I don't think there's any suggestion that Anselm is here writing down accounts of real debates that he has had with actual unbelievers. I think any more than his ontological proof is intended to persuade actual skeptics. This is a devotional exercise for him. It's a way of using his reason to praise God. The equivalent of building cathedral or writing a motet, that's what he's constructing in philosophical terms, and he needs this counterpoint as part of it. But although they're eye-catching these figures, in some ways they're no more real

than the imaginary Jews who are put into debates that are written between Christians and Jews, which always finish with the Jews saying, well, yes, of course, you're right. I understand that I was completely wrong. Please baptize me. Which, you know, strangely is not what actually happens when you see real debates going on between Christians and Jews in this period. So I think if we really want to see what actual medieval unbelief looks like, we need to give up on the idea that there's going to be that sort of clear philosophical

articulation of it, the kind that we do see post-Spinosa and into the modern period. I think it's that lack of clear philosophical statements of it that have led to the idea that's most famously associated with the French medievalist ducian Feverla, that atheism was impossible in the Middle Ages. Literally, nobody who's looked at this subject in the last 50 years thinks that's true. But it remains this kind of powerful idea. And actually, I think there's more to Fever's argument than he's sometimes given credit for because he does say, okay, it's that articulate philosophical thing that you can't find.

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Experience Pompeii like never before on the ancients from history hit. Listen and follow wherever you get to your podcasts. The closest thing that we get to a modern atheist are these straw men, right? the way that you can articulate the ism, the way that you can have this conversation is, oh, well, let's make up the idea of the biggest idiot that we can, right? So the stupidest person that you know would think in this way, which is completely antithetical, I think, to the way that we now kind of approach atheism. So there's no modern atheist equivalent in the medieval period, but that doesn't mean that there aren't unbelievers. So is there a modern day equivalent

to medieval, what we might call atheists or certainly non-believers now? You know, if we're looking around for the kind of guy who doesn't believe in God in the Middle Ages. Do we have anybody like that now, I suppose? Well, yeah, I think we do. And I hope people forgive me if this sounds provocative. But the people in the modern world who I keep going to as representative of what medieval unbelief looks like are flat earthers, or insert the conspiracy theory of your choice, because I do think that kind of conspiratorial mindset is part of what's going on here. And it has to be. If you're in a world where all of the structures of education and authority say to you very clearly, there's a strong consensus that this is what the world looks like. This is what the universe looks like. This is what ethics look like. Everything is structured this way. You've got to fit into this structure and obey it.

And that's said to you very firmly with great unanimity, but without a huge amount of power to reach into your life. what that leaves scope for are the people who bridle at having their lives disciplined in this way, or who look around them and think, well, yeah, I know everybody's telling me that the world is round, but it looks flat to me. What you repeatedly see is this sort of anti-philosophical sets of ideas. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's in the medieval periods in 14th century Spain, I think, that the story of the Emperor's New Clothes first surfaces. No matter how many people tell me to admire what I'm being told that I'm looking at,

I just don't think that's that. So when you see, as you repeatedly do, people saying things like, well, I don't think I've got a soul, or that the soul just dies when the body does. a dead body looks pretty dead to me and the dead body of a person looks the same as the dead body of an animal. Or maybe most commonly of all, the most important single flashpoint for doubt in the whole medieval period, refusing to believe in the miracle of the mass, refusing to believe that what's on the altar and still looks very much like bread and wine, the priest is telling you, no, it's not bread and wine anymore, it just looks that way.

And you're thinking, yeah, really? I mean, of course, this is very widespread. The fact that there are so many stories of people being given miraculous visions to see the sacrament as it really is indicate how pervasive those sorts of doubts and questions are. And to ask these sorts of questions, you don't need scholarship. You don't need a tradition behind you. What you need is a degree of intelligence, a degree of intellectual. intellectual independence. You need suspicion of the learned authorities that are telling you to believe

stuff. And you also need to be not too well educated, not too well woven into these structures. And that means that, of course, you can't hold your own in debate against them, because when the theologians come at you, you don't have their training. And so you're just driven back to saying, no, I don't see it. In much the same way as if you hear a flat-earthor debating a proper astronomer, you know, I mean, it's embarrassing. Yeah. Because they don't share a vocabulary that allows them to maintain a proper debate. But what the flat-eartha can do, which is the same as what the medieval doubter could do, is say it's a conspiracy.

The idea that Christianity is a trick is a means by which the church maintains power, extracts money from people, people and stops people doing what they want to do. This is something which suggests itself to a degree to everybody who has ever resented being forced to comply with moral regulations which they don't want to, or being compelled to pay tithes that they don't want to. That doesn't mean that everybody who bridles a little bit at the church's strictures is thereby an unbeliever of some kind, but that's maybe the most obvious route to it. Partly because when some sort of restriction is put on you, which you don't like, you challenge it, and the priest obviously calls for backup in the shape of God.

This isn't just me. I'm here representing the church, and the church is representing God. Therefore, you, as the person challenging it, have got a choice either to back down, which of course what most people will do, or to expand your quarrel to include. If God tells me to do this, then to hell with God. And you often get these sorts of views expressed in those kinds of angry, dismissive terms, which is why one of the places where you see these accusations of unbelief most regularly are in cases of blasphemy, where people have been brought before the courts for saying

outrageous, offensive things. And it's sometimes not clear whether there's some real denial. I don't believe there is a God kind of thing. there, or it's just an expression of rage at the priests who are saying these things or just bridling against unwelcome authority. This is an interesting one because, so you bring this up in your book and my ears pricked up immediately because I've run into this particular one over and over again, which is people who get in trouble for saying that transubstantiation can't be real because if it was, Jesus' body would have had to be the size of a mountain and by now

it would have been eaten away by priests. And I've seen this come up where people get in trouble in court rolls in bohemia, where they're just throwing it around in taverns. And maybe they're doing it for a laugh and just saying, oh, I'm being quite witty, ha. But I've also seen it come up where people are dragged before inquisitors and things like this. It certainly comes up in the Albigensian crusade, for example, when people get in trouble for that. So when we see these kind of documented cases of unbelief, can we call them unbelief, or are they just blasphemy, or are they just people letting off steam?

Or is it, sometimes could it just be making a joke? Right. I think sometimes it's that. Obviously, the courts tend to flatten out the differences between these sorts of events. And very often you can feel in these records the difference between how something is said in the alehouse and how it sounds when the words are read out

in front of the inquisitorial tribunal. I think that social setting in which these sorts of words are pronounced is really important. These sorts of statements have got something performative about them. Yeah, exactly. One of the most common contexts for it is gambling, and there's something defiant about that, either cursing your luck. I think there's something parallel between the way that these accusations of blasphemy are made and the similar vein of cases where people are prosecuted for cursing their own parents.

Yeah. There's something of that kind of devil may care, almost literally, attitude about it. There's a, I think I said in the book, it's like spiritual Russian roulette. You're kind of demonstrating to the people around you that, because you're not afraid of God, you're not afraid of anything. No matter what they can bring to you, you are willing to say anything. And so you reach for the most shocking things that you can find. There's a deliberate maneuver in that. I do think that one of the ways that it's sensible to think about, in this period is the different social settings in which it appears in its different forms and the alehouse and the gambling house and in a slightly different way the brothel. Let's say these are spaces where the authority of the church is already not operating terribly strongly. It feels like these are relatively safe spaces in that sense in which to go beyond norms and also spaces in which going beyond and challenging social norms is to some extent rewarded. There's a cachet to be had from it. What in a military or naval context, this very distinct, tightly contained world, almost entirely male, no normal structures of religious authority. Again, you see something similar.

There's something comparable that happens in some political circumstances where in the council chamber there can be a sense of it, really, that's for simple people. You see a slightly different strain religious cynicism, let's say emerging in that kind of setting at times. There's a whole medical theme to this as well. A really long-standing trope going right back into the ancient world that physicians, if not atheists, then at least to some extent that their practice some built-in antipathy to normal Christianity. It's an oddly secularised space, the physician's consulting in them, I think, right through the medieval period. There are these kind of spaces in which it's socially possible for people who would not dream of saying these things when they are at home with their families or when they're in church or

in a public place, you can say them when you're in one of these different settings. That's quite interesting because I think certainly one of the places where I see often in my own work, people who argue directly against the church are physicians and usually in the context of sexual maladies. So they'll say, actually, it's really important that unmarried women orgasm or their womb will collapse and they'll become poisoned. So you can go to the doctor. and be seen to by the doctor. And physicians will say, this is absolutely necessary. This is a medical procedure, and it's not sinful.

They're constantly writing about how this is 100% not sinful. And the church is constantly writing about how, no, I'm afraid it is, my man. So you see it come up again and again. But I guess you've already touched on this. Here's these spaces that we see a little bit more of a possibility to express non-belief. Do we see differences in terms of gender when we see, expressions of non-belief happen as well? Sure. I mean, it's problems of sources, obviously.

Right. Even so, these kinds of expressions of unbelief do seem to be pretty strongly gendered. Yeah. I know of only a handful of expressions of doubt that are in any way plausibly put in women's mouths in the medieval period. You find many more, once we get into the early modern period, we have a different set of sources come on stream, but they are different in nature. Blasphemy really seems to be a pretty strongly gendered practice. Of course. Which is not to say that women are not foul-mouthed and accused of saying shocking things

before church courts, but they say different shocking things. It doesn't usually seem to involve this business of deliberately defying God in some way. That just doesn't appear to be one of the registers in which women's anger, social defiance, expresses itself. All of the other places that I'm talking about are maybe almost defined by their masculinity. The alehouse, the gambling house, the military, the council chamber. Obviously, the world of learned physics is exclusively male, and the worlds of informal medicine by their nature don't tend to leave us with the same kinds of records as we might like. There is a question about how all of this relates to the history of witchcraft and accusations of witchcraft, which you could say

that's one of the ways in which women's profound defiance of religious norms is seen to express itself. I'd be wary of pushing that. My hunch about the way that the strong association between women and witchcraft arises is different and is more to do with gendered ways that violence is expressed. in that if you're a man and you want to kill somebody, then you go and stab them, whereas women stereotypically will poison. And so you get these more sort of indirect forms of violence that get translated into witchcraft. But once you've got that form established, I think that becomes really potentially quite significant for the ways in which women do or don't express unbelief, that if you're going to embrace those kinds of defiance, then that's a bunch of categories through which

you can. And it's also a very strong reason why you wouldn't want to, because A reputation as a witch is something that most people are not keen to court. So when we do see these people crop up, do we see intellectuals or really powerful people who are putting forward ideas of non-belief ever? Is there any kind of source work for something like that? There are some very well-known individuals who are associated with doubt and defiance of the norms of the church. The Emperor Frederick II is one of the most famous.

But equally, Pope Boniface VIII is accused of. saying over dinner, pointing to the carcass on his plate and saying, I have no more sold than this capon. You've got to be very careful with these sorts of accusations, which are clearly always raised as a political maneuver. These are intended to damage people to make them notorious, to put them beyond the pale of Christian respectability. And it's plain that many of these accusations are at best exaggerated, if not just invented out of whole cloth. But the fact that you've got this repeated tendency to, in some relatively extreme cases, to slap these labels onto major figures.

And King William II of England has the same one of the King's Jerusalem. There's questions raised about him. So, you know, this comes up again and again. And of course, if you're a powerful individual, either in the secular world or in the church, to some extent you've got more immunity than your tavern brawler would be. You're not quite such an easy person to arrest. if the church is unhappy about you, you might be dealt with initially more gently. So you do find some of these sorts of questions being raised by and about these kinds of individuals.

And there are cases that make their way before the church courts of some quite powerful high-profile churchmen, often monks, who are accused of saying, oh, it's all nonsense. And there's a fellow who is asked whether he has a soul, and it's the same word in Italian for a soul and for the stone of a peach. and he says no, a peach has a soul. That kind of defiance, you do find surfacing at those sorts of higher levels as well. And of course, what we don't know is how big an iceberg is beneath that tip. Is it that everybody who says such a thing sooner or later gets picked up and winds up before a court, or are these a tiny handful and there's a vast reservoir of unspoken doubt out there? Okay, so my kind of a penultimate question here, if what we're talking about is there's this possibly

a reservoir of doubt, right? Possibly. There are a bunch of people who are sitting around where no one can hear them and no one is writing down what they say because they're peasants or their regular people. Do we have any kind of actual sources where anyone does ever put down in words these kind of ideas? I know that there are rumors about there's the very famous book, The Three Impostors, right? A very famous apocryphal book that doesn't exist, right? It doesn't have, but. Yeah, so in theory, like someone's sitting around, right? Can you just talk us through? that. I think that's quite a useful way of answering your question. The book of the three impostors is supposedly a book which argues the three impostors of the title are Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Yeah. It's seen as the founder figures of the three great religions of the Mediterranean world. This supposed book argues that they are the three greatest impostors in the world because they've invented these three great tricks, their religions which have been used to deceive and exploit people down the centuries. And it's a book that

doesn't need to be written because I've already told you everything that's in it. In a sense, the title explains itself. The rest of the book is surplus requirements. A book under that title is produced by French atheists in the late 17th, early 18th century. And it's tediously obvious. It just makes that point. You don't need to read it. But I think the really interesting thing about this book, this non-book, is the conviction that it's there. And the huge number of people who get credited with writing it, including Edward Frederick II himself, through to the point where a version of it is finally confected. Lots of people claim to have met somebody who's met somebody who's seen it.

And I think that, I was talking about conspiracy theorizing before. There's a reverse of that as well. The fear that there is this secret society of unbelief, of blasphemy, of doubt, that is passing down these appalling ideas from generation to generation and nourishing these underground movements. Of course, that's parallel to the way that the medieval church thinks about heresy. It always has to have this kind of genealogical quality to it, and they always want to see heretical movements as big, organized conspiracies led by various kind of Antichrist figures,

which sometimes there is some element to that, but often these movements are much more disparate and disorganized, and the organization exists in the paranoid imagination of the Inquisitor, more than in reality. And I think that's so in spades when we're talking about doubt and unbelief. I've not seen anything that leads me to think that there is a live intellectual or social tradition that is passed down from generation to generation into which people are inducted. There's very little in the series evidence that describes people learning their doubts from anywhere else. you may begin to get a bit of that with the rediscovery of Lucretius

and of the Epicurean sources in the Reformation. But even then, very few people who are reading Lucretius, who is as shockingly atheistic, strictly speaking an atheist, he does believe in the existence of the deity. He absolutely rejects Christian, both philosophical and ethical norms. Almost none of the people who are reading Lucretius

are in any way taken up by this. The only possible exception to that is Machiavelli. Clearly, very enthusiastic about this. But Machiavelli is a little bit out on his own. In some ways, I think the problem for the medieval church is almost worse than there being a conspiracy of atheists, because at least a conspiracy could be broken up and its leaders arrested and this thing could, in principle, be brought to an end. It's rather that these ideas are just bubbling up again and again in each generation. Because the simplicity of what's

being argued that dead people are dead, that the bread on the altar is just bread on the altar, that when you pray and what you pray for doesn't happen, that's not because God has decided not to do what you've asked, but because he's not hearing you. These are not ideas that you need a university education to be able to articulate. And it's the people who are outside of the educational structures, which is, of course, almost everybody,

who are the most likely to be able to articulate. So I'm wary of the kind of intellectual genealogy, history of ideas way of thinking about this stuff. I think it's just a perennial feature of medieval life, maybe a human life. The assumption that there must be an intellectual continuity is partly driven by, I think, undervaluing of the creativity and independence of people's thoughts throughout the period. This is a perfect setup for my last question, so thank you for reading my mind, which is, do you think then a part of our willingness to ignore unbelief, to ignore atheism, is a facet of our own kind of snobbery about the medieval period and individuals,

just common individuals more generally? Because I think that we have this tendency to wish to see medieval people as stupid and backward and not as sophisticated as we are. And when you have unbelief really driven from this kind of grassroots emotional perspective, It calls into question our own ideas about atheism as being quite cosmopolitan and very well thought out. So we just ignore the people who don't make it look good. I'm sure there's an element of that, as I'm suggesting the best modern equivalent to the medieval atheists to flat earthers. I'm aware that nobody in particular is flattered by that comparison by politics.

I'm trying. I think there is an important theme there, though, which is the tendency, maybe the excessive tendency that we have. And by we, especially those of us who read and write books and are interested in ideas and those sorts of things that people, I imagine, who are listening to this podcast, one of the errors that we are prone to is to exaggerate the importance of intellectual authority and of ideas as promulgated by learned people. Now, if there's one thing that living through the last decade or two has taught us, it's that intellectual elites don't run. society as much as they think they do. I'm trying. I know we're doing our best here, but it didn't seem to be working that well. And I think that assumption that societies really are governed by the intellectual frameworks

that they are set and that people tag along behind what those authorities demand is not true of our own age and it's even less true of the medieval period. So if you're interested in the history of ideas and the high culture of the medieval period and you absolutely should be, of course, that is a profoundly and sophisticatedly Christianised world doing all sorts of complex and wonderful and sometimes not so wonderful things with that tradition. But the wider world in any period, I think, does not conform so typely to the spirit of the age, as we might assume. It's true of the medieval period.

It's true of the 19th century, the revolutionary era. it's true of ourselves. It's easy to use terms like the age of faith, to talk about the Middle Ages or the age of reasons, to talk about the 18th century or whatever it might be, but people are more plural than any of these things. And I think the real problem here is not the assumption that we have seen the Middle Ages as religious and we should in fact see them as irreligious. They are profound. It's a profoundly Christian period. But the reductiveness of summarizing an entire society full of people, all of whom are as complex as you or I are under a single set of labels. That's, I think, a fantastic place to leave

it. So thank you so much, Alec, for joining me. And thank you to all of our listeners for being here. This has been Gone Medieval by History Hit. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to rate, review, and follow the podcast, and please tell your friends about it. If you're looking for more medieval goodness in your life and who isn't, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter by following the link in the show notes below.