Watkins - History and the Supernatural in Medieval England

History and the Supernatural in Medieval England

This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as clerical and lay, popular and elite, Christian and pagan as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualised by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important new light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed.

CARL WATKINS is Lecturer in Central Medieval History at the Faculty of History, Cambridge University, and Fellow of Magdalene College.

Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series

General Editor:

Rosamond McKitterick

Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College

Advisory Editors:

Christine Carpenter

Professor of Medieval English History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of New Hall

Jonathan Shepard

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by G. G. Coulton in 1921; Professor Rosamond McKitterick now acts as General Editor of the Fourth Series, with Professor Christine Carpenter and Dr Jonathan Shepard as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by medieval scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from political economy to the history of ideas.

For a list of titles in the series, see end of book .