Since the Enlightenment, historians and theorists of religion have often worked with a two-tiered model of Christianity, in which the pure belief and practice of the enlightened few was perceived as constantly under pressure and in danger of corruption or distortion from the grosser religion of the multitude. This imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large underlay much Enlightenment historiography, most notably Gibbon’s account of the early history of Christianity, and has remained potent in such influential twentieth century works as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Even the future Cardinal Newman could contrast ‘what has power to stir holy and refined souls’ with the ‘religion of the multitude’ which he once described as ‘ever vulgar and abnormal’. Newman, as more than one contributor to this volume shows, had in fact an acute sense of the value, even the normative value, of popular religious perceptions, but those implicit polarities and the historical condescension they encode have been recurrent and assertive ghosts, haunting the writing of religious history, in contrasts between official and unofficial religion, or those between clerical and lay, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, hierarchical and charismatic.

The political connotations of godparenthood and baptismal sponsorship in creating both vertical and horizontal bonds between individuals and groups in early medieval Europe have long been recognized. What follows offers a case study of sixth- and early seventh-century Visigothic Spain, asking whether the baptismal process could also serve to bring elite and popular together. Elites sought to mobilize those lower down the scale than themselves in opposition to other elites at the same time as having constantly to negotiate the elite position from which they gained their authority. In sixth-century Spain the definition and redefinition of baptismal practice in church council legislation by both Catholics and Arians was an important method for achieving this dual aim of distinction and control.

The Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses are the finest sculptured monuments to survive from early eighth-century Northumbria. For what audiences were they designed: clerics, monks or lay people? Of the two monuments, it is likely that the Bewcastle Cross is the earlier. Its designer wished to commemorate a number of benefactors of his or her community, whose names were inscribed on a panel of runic inscriptions on the west face (they are, unfortunately, now largely illegible: see figs 1 and 2). He or she was the first to introduce a number of highly significant theological ideas into Northumbrian sculpture. The Ruthwell designer, who did not set out to commemorate any individuals, expanded and developed theological ideas found in embryo on the Bewcastle Cross (figs 3 and 4). The Bewcastle and the Ruthwell Crosses, both, are best understood in terms of the theological and liturgical interests of Bede’s scholarly circle, in particular of Bishop Acca of Hexham, Bede’s bishop and patron; and of Bede’s friend and correspondent Bishop Pehthelm of Whithorn. Hexham lies east of Bewcastle, and Whithorn west of Ruthwell: I would date Bewcastle within the episcopacy of Acca, i.e. between 709 and 731; and Ruthwell a little later, say between 732 and 740 (the year Acca died). In this period the abbot of Wearmoudi-Jarrow was Hwætberht (abbot 716–c.750). Hwætberht was known as ‘Eusebius’ to his scholarly friends, presumably because of his interest in Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine and the cult of the Cross. Rosemary Cramp and Richard Bailey have convincingly related the beautiful cross-slab at Jarrow to the abbacy and patronage of Hwœtberht. In his account of King Oswald’s victory, in the sign of the Cross, at Heavenfield, Bede implies that the Cross was, for the Northumbrian aristocracy and the clerics associated with them, the primary symbol of the Christian Faith.

Amongst various features still being evaluated as characteristic of West Frankish society in c.1000 AD, one of the most striking, is that into the middle of the century a range of essentially unrelated and geographically widespread sources speak of ‘heresy’ newly affecting the populace. But how should we interpret these apparently diverse phenomena? Of the models which heresiologists explore, too often overlooked is that proposed by Janet Nelson in this very forum in 1971. Her thesis, that a ‘crisis in theodicy’ produced a cognitive need for new explanations which ‘heresy’ answered, whilst not explicitly anthropological, focused on understanding phenomena within societal wholes. This explanation was challenged by the anthropologist Talal Asad, who argued that heretical activity simply indicated urban movements over which clerics were unable to extend their authority.

From the time of the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 to at least the first decade of the twelfth century, there was an apparently universal understanding amongst the people of Christendom that those who joined the pilgrimage-in-arms that set out to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Land should be regarded as imitators of Christ. This was remarkable, for the imitation of Christ was understood by contemporaries to be the paramount ideal of spiritual perfection and, before 1095, only attainable by a total withdrawal from the world and a commitment to a monastic way of life. Yet with Pope Urban II’s Clermont sermon, the spirituality that was previously the preserve of those milites Christi who fought spiritual battles in the cloister was now also available to those who fought for Christ in the world. As the biographer of one prominent first crusader famously put it, before the proclamation of the crusade, his subject was ‘uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world. But after the call to arms in the service of Christ, the twofold reason for fighting inflamed him beyond belief.’

The institutional emphasis on distinctions between the elite and the ordinary faithful is a feature of a number of religions. Such distinctions permit rich and diverse forms of exchange across the lines they demarcate, not simply reducible to economic models of explanation, but subject to symbolic and cultural negotiation. These exchanges fostered social ideals, implicit understandings and modes of behaviour that helped to make hierarchy in complex societies appear cohesive, normative and consensual. But a danger exists in confusing the normative value of these exchanges as represented in writing with the material and ideological effects towards which they worked. In the absence of popular religious thoughts and feelings, which Christopher Brooke rightly reminds us ‘have left little memorial for posterity’, we are left with the discursive claims made in historical sources on behalf of elite and popular distinctions. My aim in this paper is to explore the implications of this for the study of the cult of the saints in twelfth-century England. I will argue that in such interpretive conditions, any discussion of these matters in terms of elite and popular religion risks losing sight of the discursive function of these texts and of the wider understandings and negotiations that lie behind them.

With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular religion.

When K. B. McFarlane wrote his biography of John Wycliffe he was surprised to find that the hero who emerged was not Wycliffe himself but his implacable opponent, William Courtenay, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1381 to 1396. ‘Justice has never been done to Courtenay’s high qualities, above all to the skill and magnanimity with which he led his order through the crisis that now threatened it’, he wrote admiringly, adding by way of explanation that, ‘Since the reformation his has been the unpopular side.’ The impression McFarlane gave is that there were two ecclesiastical camps in late fourteenth-century England: heretical and orthodox. The fabric of English church life was fractured then, for ever, by the beliefs and work of Wycliffe and his adherents; was not McFarlane’s biography entitled John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity? Yet McFarlane’s assessment of heresy was that this was far from being a monolithic movement; indeed, in a private letter he wrote, ‘Wycliffe was merely an extremist in a widespread reform movement.’

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

Late twentieth-century scholarship on the Cistercian monastic order was dominated by the distinction between elite and popular. The terminology was specific to the Cistercian debate -namely, ‘ideals’ versus ‘reality’ rather than ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ – but the logic of a high Cistercian culture and a low Cistercian culture is one that students of any elite/popular debate will find familiar. The indispensable modern survey of Cistercian history, published in 1977, is the key promoter of this argument, with its title presenting an eloquent statement of its thesis: The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality. Although the focus of current investigations into elite and popular religion is undoubtedly the extent to which both varieties of religion are legitimate cultural forces which influence and depend on each other, the Cistercian argument was formulated in a much more hierarchical way and clearly saw the elite Cistercian life as the more legitimate of the two monastic expressions. The argument is that members of the Cistercian order exhibited a more or less ideal form of corporate religious life during the first one hundred years of the order’s existence, but that after the late twelfth century the order gradually lost its purity. Two aspects of popular life infiltrated the enclosed world of the cloister: first, the grubby realities of economics; and, second, interactions with women, generally meaning interactions with the increasing numbers of Cistercian nunneries.

Recent years have witnessed the study of late medieval religion change and develop almost beyond recognition. In particular, the phenomenon of ‘popular’ or ‘traditional’ religion has increasingly been placed under the microscope. A succession of studies has questioned the view that an unbridgeable chasm existed between the religious sensibilities of the privileged echelons of society (the higher clergy and members of the nobility) and those of the lower social orders. The apparent sea-change in our understanding of how many expressions of belief and devotion were shared across a wide social spectrum has led, however, to more questions than answers.

At some point in the 1520s the printer Richard Pynson ran off a poster to spread information about an indulgence. The sheet has a poor survival rate: what appears to be the unique extant copy exists as printer’s waste used for book-binding, and is now badly damaged. Nevertheless, the bit which matters for present purposes is almost intact. It notes that Cardinal Wolsey had offered a pardon of ten years and ten Lents to all who recited a specific psalm and set of prayers ‘for the most noble and prosperous estate of our soverayne lorde king Henry the .viii. the quene and the pryncesse’, which could be gained once each day. In addition, all the other bishops of the realm had offered forty days of pardon to everyone who recited five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, and a Creed for the same intent. (How often that indulgence could be gained is unclear: it may have been secured at each recitation.) The Latin prayers specified to gain Wolsey’s pardon were printed on the bottom half of the sheet, but more than half of that text is now lost.

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?

In rejecting the distinction between elite and popular religion, Eamon Duffy’s presidential address echoes a much earlier contribution to Studies in Church History. Arnaldo Momigliano found the dichotomy misleading where Christian historians of Late Antiquity were concerned, as Dermot Fenlon points out later in this volume, showing that the other historians too were thinking along the same lines. In the present volume Professor Duffy makes a similar point with great force for a different time and place, late medieval England. Here and in his Stripping of the Altars the liturgy has a key role in his argument. He observes that Books of Hours or Primers are a form of the monastic office. Taking his thought further on lines he clearly intends, one could argue that the psychology of prayer is similar in the two cases and similar to the rosary also. In all three cases thoughts need not be about the words, for the focus of the prayer may be different, but the words work as a mantra to shut out distractions and create a devout frame of mind.

The Union between Poland and Lithuania, whose foundations were laid in 1386 with the baptism of Jagiello, the pagan grand duke of Lithuania, and his marriage to Queen Jadwiga (Hedwig), daughter of the last king of Poland, marked the beginning of a systematic Christianization to which the pagan Lithuanians offered remarkably little resistance. Recent research on religious practice under the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty in Poland and Lithuania (1386–1572) shows that royal piety was often designed to elicit participation at a popular level, cementing both the diffusion of Christian involvement across the newly unified kingdom, and in turn the role of the royal family at its centre. Surviving royal accounts and prayer books can offer a privileged insight into the personal religion of the monarchs and their relatives. These accounts, although only partially extant, constitute an objective source by which religious practices may be understood. Created for bureaucratic reasons, to keep order in the Treasurer’s Chancery, rather than to present the king as pious, they detail expenses for masses and other opera pia of the king and his family, recording the rhythm of royal religious practices – for the day, the week and the whole liturgical year. The accounts also provide evidence of sacramental practices and royal almsgiving. Pious literature composed at the behest of the Jagiellons, combined with extant pedagogical treatises and didactic sermons delivered in the presence of the monarch, is particularly valuable in admitting us into the world of royal Christian education.

In the early 1520s, there appeared from the press of Michael Buchführer in Erfurt a pamphlet entitled A Dialogue or Conversation between a Father and a Son concerning the Teachings of Martin Luther and Other Matters of the Christian Faith. It was an unremarkable publication, a typical Reformation Flugschrift in almost every respect: it was quarto size, sixteen pages long, unbound, with a woodcut illustration on the title page depicting the main events described in the pamphlet. The dialogue is between a student home from the university of Wittenberg and his peasant father: the son converts his father to Luther’s cause, and his mother consigns to the flames the family’s prized letter of indulgence. The pamphlet is anonymous.

What might count as elite religion and popular religion within the restricted sphere of literate culture? The answer here is in terms of the production and reception of religious texts. Who wrote them and who read them, and with what kinds of assumptions and attitudes? Here I discuss the following questions: do the categories ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ divide up the field without remainder? Are ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ necessarily at odds? If ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ are not necessarily at odds, are they sometimes so?