valid tools. In his Time, Work and Culture (1980), Le Goff discussed the function of
blood tabus in certain professions, the connection between official processions and folk
religion, dragon lore, and the myth of Melusine, the serpent-tailed woman of dynastic
foundation legends. Focused on a specific area and regional culture, Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978) also joined folklore and
history. Based on a 14th-century inquisitor’s records of a heresy-hunting expedition in a
previously Cathar-Albigensian region, Ladurie combined ethnology, sociology,
anthropology, and folklore as domains of the historian. He classified the behaviors of the
people of Montaillou according to recognizable folklore categories and discussed beliefs
within the broader context afforded by a comparative folkloristic view.
In the 1970s, the study of popular religion and popular religious sensitivity
accelerated. The use of clerical writers, theologians, and even inquisitors was being
recognized as an important means of retrieving fragments of folk culture. Essays on
Languedoc in the 13th and 14th centuries, by Étienne Delaruelle, Bernard Plongeron, and
Jean-Claude Schmitt (Cahiers de Fanjeaux 11 [1985]), examined the saints, feasts,
legends, and amulets of popular piety. Ethnologist Claude Gaignebet’s Art profane et
religion populaire (1985) was a syncretic rereading of medieval culture and folklore in
which iconography, myth, custom, and literature combined to underscore the pivotal
importance of time, the folk calendar, and myth. He reopened the forbidden dossier of
obscenity in art and culture, stressed the popular foundations of great texts of medieval
literature, and incorporated isolated folk practices into systems of myth and religion,
parallel but not always opposed to Christianity. Symbolic and mythical readings of the
folk calendar were furthered in Philippe Walter’s studies of time and hagiography in
medieval narratives, and his dictionary of Christian mythology (1992) provides a useful
summary of medieval folklore, myth, and ritual.
Francesca Canadé Sautman
[See also: APOLLONIUS DE TYR; ARTHUR; CHANSON DE GESTE; CHANSON
DE TOILE; COOKING; CUSTUMALS/COUTUMIERS; DANCE; DIET AND
NUTRITION; EXEMPLUM; FABLE (ISOPET); FABLIAU; GUILD;
HAGIOGRAPHY; HEALTH CARE; JONGLEUR; MAGIC; MUSICAL
INSTRUMENTS; MUSICAL PERFORMANCE PRACTICE; NECROMANCY;
PILGRIMAGE; POPULAR DEVOTION; PROCESSION; PROVERB; RAIS, GILLES
DE; ROBERT LE DIABLE; ROMANCE; RURAL SOCIAL STRUCTURE; SAINTS,
CULT OF; SAINTS’ LIVES; THEATER; WITCHCRAFT]
Ashley, Kathleen, and Pamela Sheingorn. Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late
Medieval Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans.
J.E.Anderson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Gaignebet, Claude, and Dominique Lajoux. Art profane et religion populaireau moyen âge. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1984.
Jeay, Madeleine. Savoir faire: une analyse des croyances des “Évangiles des quenouilles” (XVe
siècle). Montreal: Le Moyen Français, 1982.
Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray. New
York: Braziller, 1978.
Medieval Folklore. Lewiston: Mellen, 1991–. [Annual.]
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 680