Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 39013
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Nelson , Jinty
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Carolingian Doubt?
  • Source: Studies in Church History 52, ( 2016): Pages 65 - 86.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Journal Article
  • Subject (See Also): Dhuoda, Countess of Barcelona and Septimania Waiting to be Indexed
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: France; Iberia
  • Century: 8- 9
  • Primary Evidence:
  • Illustrations:
  • Table:
  • Abstract: This essay seeks to refute the idea that doubt is an essentially modern phenomenon and to show that doubt was also a feature of earlier medieval existence. It argues that in the Carolingian period, for both individuals and groups, debate, disturbance and religious doubt coexisted uneasily with religious faith and cultic community. Religious experience is examined at the level of individuals, groups, and larger social organizations. Three case studies focus on the noblewoman Dhuoda, unique in having left a detailed record of a spiritual life lived out within a family and in social and political relationships at once collaborative and conflictual; the heretic Gottschalk, whose voluminous works reveal something of his spirituality and much about the religious and political pressures that taxed his faith; and Archbishop Elipand of Toledo, a Church leader living under Muslim rule, and accused of heresy by Christian scholars themselves uncertain of their ground. Two further sections discuss particular contexts in which doubts were harboured: conversion from paganism, in a world of Christian mission; and local cults of relics which depended on the establishing of authenticity where there had been doubt, and then the forming of believer-solidarities. Finally the figure of Doubting Thomas is considered in a period when faith and cult sustained individual identities in dyadic relationships founded on oaths of fidelity and mutual trust but also on collective solidarities. [Reproduced from the journal page on the Cambridge University Press website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-church-history.]
  • Related Resources:
  • Author's Affiliation: King's College, London
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2016.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 04242084