Cultures & Contexts: Pagan Europe

Catalog description

In pre-modern Europe, where a Christian outlook prevailed, the existence of pre-Christian cultures drove a master narrative that all but cast them off as the heterodox mythology and magic of primitive religions. We examine both the medieval evidence for the nature of European pagan cultures and the tendency of modern scholarship to endorse the medieval self-proclaimed image of a monolithic Christian occident. The medieval discourse on paganism cannot be reduced to its condemnation and rejection; this would ignore the ways that the predominant culture had in fact integrated elements of paganism into its theology, philosophy, rituals, calendar, life-cycle events, scientific knowledge, intellectual categories, literary creations, artistic repertoire, and physical environment. As we consider a millennium of European civilization (60 c.e.-1600 c.e.) from the perspective of paganism, we cross-pollinate multiple streams of evidence (textual, archeological, artifactual) with various epistemologies (history, anthropology, folklore, literary criticism), which will allow a new chronology and a new geography to emerge.