French, the powerful hand of God was as clearly visible in the victories of Jeanne d’Arc
as it had been, nearly a millennium earlier, in Clovis’s triumph.
Daniel E.Bornstein
[See also: ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE; CATHARS; CLOVIS I; CONFRÉRIE DE
LA PASSION; CRUSADES; DOMINICAN ORDER; FOLKLORE; FRANCISCAN
ORDER; GREGORY OF TOURS; HERESIES, APOSTOLIC; HERESY; JEANNE
D’ARC; LIMBOURG BROTHERS; MARTIN OF TOURS; MYSTICISM; PETER DE
BRUYS; PILGRIMAGE; PREACHING; PRÉMONTRÉ; RELICS AND
RELIQUARIES; ROBERT D’ARBRISSEL; SAINTS, CULT OF;
WALDO/WALDENSES; WOMEN, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF]
Adam, Paul. La vie paroissiale en France au XIVe siècle. Paris: Sirey, 1964.
Brooke, Rosalind, and Christopher Brooke. Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe
1000–1300. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984.
Chiffoleau, Jacques. La comptabilité de l’au-delà: les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région
d’Avignon a la fin du moyen âge. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980.
Delaruelle, Étienne. La piété populaire au moyen âge. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980.
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Gurevitch, Aron. Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hilgarth, J.N., ed. Christianity and Paganism, 350–750: The Conversion of Western Europe. rev.
ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Lambert, Malcolm. Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the
Reformation. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Vauchez, André. The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed.
Daniel E.Bornstein, trans. Margery G.Schneider. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1993.
POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHY
. All demographic figures from the Middle Ages are approximate, but about general
trends and sizes a consensus is developing, except in regard to sex ratios and age at
marriage. From a high of perhaps 5.7 million ca. A.D. 165, the population of Gaul fell to
fewer than 4 million by 500. Germanic tribes raided Gaul in the 3rd century and occupied
it in the 5th, becoming a majority in sparsely populated Flanders, where their language
predominated, but remaining a minority of less than 10 percent in distant Aquitaine. The
population reached its nadir despite their influx and that of British refugees to Armorica
(Brittany). Villages that grew from Gallic settlements or Roman villas predominated over
hamlets and isolated farmsteads, except in hilly or mountainous regions too poor to
support denser settlement.
In the 6th century, the population grew somewhat, but the Arab conquests in the
Mediterranean world between 636 and 732 disrupted external trade and hastened urban
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