POPULAR DEVOTION
. Until recently, studies of medieval spirituality and devotion have concentrated on the
ascetic and mystical writings of a monastic or clerical elite. However, the emergence of a
broader understanding of the spirituality of a people as the dynamic unity of the content
of a faith, and the manner in which that faith is lived and expressed by people in a given
historical and cultural setting, has led to a recognition that the inarticulate and illiterate
might have a spiritual life. Efforts are now being made to uncover the ideas implicit in
devotional actions and to recover a spirituality written in bod ies rather than books.
Recent studies show that devotional practices and attitudes cut across the lines separating
aristocrat and peasant, clerical and lay persons, literate/elite and illiterate/masses, and
other social distinctions. Devotional practices were shared rituals, gestures, and attitudes
reflecting group and individual piety.
Christianity came to France in many ways, but perhaps the most public was the
conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, ca. 497, as narrated by Gregory of Tours. At a
critical moment in a battle, when defeat seemed imminent, Clovis appealed to the God
favored by his Catholic wife, Clotilde, and the sudden and complete victory that followed
persuaded him to accept her faith. One thought, however, gave him pause. How would
the Franks react when their ruler abandoned their ancestral gods? But before Clovis could
even begin to address his people, they cried in unison: “We will give up worshiping our
mortal gods, pious King, and are prepared to follow the immortal God about whom Remi
preaches.” And so, in a church adorned with white hangings, perfumed tapers, and clouds
of incense, Clovis and his warriors were baptized by the holy Remi, bishop of Reims.
With this act, the Franks officially became Catholic, the first of the Germanic peoples
to do so. Their conversion indicates the character of their religion: formal, public,
gestural, perhaps superficial; a religion defined by actions and objects rather than by
belief. Indeed, what belief was involved, beyond the conviction that God was powerful
and acted for the Franks? The notion of spirituality, the interior dimension of the
religious life, seems foreign to such a religion.
The conversion of the Franks suggests the difficulties inherent in any attempt to treat
this religion as “popular” devotion. No cultural distinction separated Clovis from the
mass of the populace; given the general illiteracy of the Germanic peoples, the greatest
lords were as uneducated as any of their followers and fully shared their oral culture. That
culture was distinct from the written, Latin, Catholic culture of Gallo-Roman bishops like
Remi—distinct, but not detached. To reach the Frankish (and Gallo-Roman) populace,
Remi and the other Gallo-Roman bishops had to be effectively bicultural, able to
communicate in terms of the general culture. The “popular” devotion of the Franks and
the learned culture of the ecclesiastical leadership developed in a continuous dialogue.
The monks who first spread Christianity to the countryside encountered a folk religion
localized in springs, rocks, trees, and statues of the gods. They often attacked these
objects: Martin of Tours (d. 397/400) induced some pagans to chop down their sacred
tree by promising that he would let it fall on him; St. Gall (d. ca. 627) smashed statues
and threw the pieces into Lake Constance. But they also followed guidelines proposed by
Pope Gregory the Great in 601: the idols should be destroyed, but the temples themselves
purified with holy water and converted to Christian use; pagan sacrifices should be
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