The precise end of the Middle Ages is one of those scholarly games that meant very little to the average peasant :)
For what it's worth, the most common date I hear is 1492 (Columbus's journey). England traditionally used 1485 as the date, and the rise of the Tudors. But this is really academic, because the dates are really artificial markers to separate trends that had started centuries ago and would continue to develop for centuries more.
In that, 1486 is a bit problematic for me because the real changes that undid the medieval world - the expansion of the world for Europeans after Columbus, the Reformation beginning with Martin Luther, the Age of Reason - were still in the future.
As for the time frame of the persecutions, there's a bit of a problem there, too, because there's nothing like criminological statistics for the Middle Ages. Does an increase in reported executions mean an increase in executions, or an increase in reporting? Modern archaeological methods might shed some light on the question, but I don't know of any archaeologist who's studied this.
There's also the issue of population sizes. Populations began rising in the Early Modern Era - did executions rise proportionally, or exceed proportionality?
(I encountered this problem in researching LGBT history. For most jurisdictions, there's no history of executions at all - in most of those that remain, all evidence is anecdotal.)
Salem looms large in American history, I know, but it's a blip in witch-hunting history. Nineteen killed only. Kramer and Sprenger had claimed to have had discovered and had executed a lot more than that.
What really interests me is not folk practices - everyone agrees that some of those survived - but belief in old gods and spirits. How long did that last? In the Lithuanian situation, it turns out that priests of the old religion were still practising openly there into the 17th century.
Meanwhile, Julius Pomponius Leto's academy was raided in 1468 because the church believed it harboured ex-Christians who were so in love with Classical antiquity that they's returned to the religion of Greece and Rome. Which means that the church was hunting what we'd now call Neo-Pagans in Rome while it was still trying to convert Paleo-Pagans in eastern Europe.
So the first glimmers of Neo-Paganism overlaps temporally with the last glimmers of Paleo-Paganism. And that's the uncontroversial part. I wonder if there were more direct connections.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-14 10:35 pm (UTC)For what it's worth, the most common date I hear is 1492 (Columbus's journey). England traditionally used 1485 as the date, and the rise of the Tudors. But this is really academic, because the dates are really artificial markers to separate trends that had started centuries ago and would continue to develop for centuries more.
In that, 1486 is a bit problematic for me because the real changes that undid the medieval world - the expansion of the world for Europeans after Columbus, the Reformation beginning with Martin Luther, the Age of Reason - were still in the future.
As for the time frame of the persecutions, there's a bit of a problem there, too, because there's nothing like criminological statistics for the Middle Ages. Does an increase in reported executions mean an increase in executions, or an increase in reporting? Modern archaeological methods might shed some light on the question, but I don't know of any archaeologist who's studied this.
There's also the issue of population sizes. Populations began rising in the Early Modern Era - did executions rise proportionally, or exceed proportionality?
(I encountered this problem in researching LGBT history. For most jurisdictions, there's no history of executions at all - in most of those that remain, all evidence is anecdotal.)
Salem looms large in American history, I know, but it's a blip in witch-hunting history. Nineteen killed only. Kramer and Sprenger had claimed to have had discovered and had executed a lot more than that.
What really interests me is not folk practices - everyone agrees that some of those survived - but belief in old gods and spirits. How long did that last? In the Lithuanian situation, it turns out that priests of the old religion were still practising openly there into the 17th century.
Meanwhile, Julius Pomponius Leto's academy was raided in 1468 because the church believed it harboured ex-Christians who were so in love with Classical antiquity that they's returned to the religion of Greece and Rome. Which means that the church was hunting what we'd now call Neo-Pagans in Rome while it was still trying to convert Paleo-Pagans in eastern Europe.
So the first glimmers of Neo-Paganism overlaps temporally with the last glimmers of Paleo-Paganism. And that's the uncontroversial part. I wonder if there were more direct connections.