070143 GR Guided Reading - Dark Corners of Europe: A History of Medieval Paganism (2017S)

The GR will explore the pagan religions and cultures of Europe from late Antiquity up to the fourteenth century, when the conversion of the Lithuanians in 1387 signed one of the last episodes of European paganism. On the backdrop of narrative sources, together with older and most recent literature, the GR will explore paramount concepts such as belief, religion, and identity; together with the representation of the other. It will also offer an overview on the social and political history of the European Middle Ages.
The medieval pagan religiosity we know is largely a construct of authors, both ancient and modern, aiming to make sense in a complex and unbounded world. In the Middle Ages, Christian authors described non-Christian spirituality with bitter contempt. Narrating paganism, they framed a possible empirical observation in a given mind-set, in order to produce biased accounts, which are the only witness we can rely on. Deconstructing the medieval authors’ narratives of the pagans will; 1: furnish some insight on the ideal and practice of non-Christian religion; 2: get the students acquainted with the essence of the historian’s profession, offering them awareness of the craft’s tools and methods.
The first unit will be dedicated to some introductory issues (sources and modern interpretations). Afterward, we will move to the positivist ideas of progressive spread of Christianity and a pagan doomed resistance, going into the methodology deployed to create this master-narrative and the political ideas backing-up this investigative pattern.
The following units will be dedicated to the twilight of ancient paganism relying on classics on the topic (i.e. A. Momigliano, A. Cameron, and P. Brown) and presenting the main sources for the study of ancient heathenism (i.e. Ovid, Apollonius of Rhodes). The role of politics on religion will also be investigated by the case study of the cult of Mithras.
A general introduction of early medieval paganism will follow with the use of Merovingian Hagiographies (and reading such as I. Wood, Y. Hen, or B. Filotas). Questions of belief and practice (i.e. the existence of temples and spiritual hierarchies) will be debated on the backdrop of literary criticism and narrative tropes. A narrative such as the Origo gentis Langobardorum could be brought in example to show how boundaries between paganism and orthodoxy were actually blurred in practice. Carolingian concern with paganism and magic will come next.
Afterwards, we will analyze the uses of paganism to enforce identity both ethnic and social, taking examples from the pagan rebellions (i.e. the Saxon Stellinga), analyzed from religious as well as socio-economic perspective. This will also offer the possibility to discuss how stereotypes originally developed to describe the others, were turned by the “pagans” to represent themselves in a sort of “auto-ethnography” (M.L. Pratt).
Later units will be dedicated to representation and reality of Scandinavian and Slavic paganism relying on authors like Adam of Bremen and Thietmar of Merseburg moving to the thirteenth century Islandic narratives. Finally, we will explore fourteenth century Lithuania with the reading of S.C. Rowell´s Lithuania ascending.
The last two units will be dedicated to modern paganism and the return of the Gods in today spirituality and culture. Presenting narratives such as the Finnish Kalevala will show how imagined Middle Ages may influence modern culture (an example could be made out of M.Z. Bradley, The Mists of Avalon). Afterward, some forms of modern heathenism (and how almost all of them reflect an imagined shamanism) will be briefly presented and problematized. Moreover, I will focus on the (notorious) debate following the finding of the “Kennewick Man” with a reading from M. Gardell, Gods of the Blood. Students will be alerted that beside its possible fascination, modern paganism, also in pop and sub-cultures, often bear racist and nationalist undertones.