Religion In The Premodern Era Essay

Lauren Phan

Professor Horten

HUM 152

8 February 2017

The Power of Religion and Faith in the Premodern Era Religion and faith heavily influenced people during the premodern era. The culture of the dominant Catholic church also shaped medieval values, which meant that individuals relied on God’s will and power to help them in every aspect of their lives. Religion and faith affecting everyday medieval living is prominent in numerous sources that will be discussed. They both played an enormous role on everybody’s social interactions, beliefs in a higher power, and decisions at the time. In the novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, the protagonist Anna Frith and the fellow villagers of Eyam attempt to survive a horrendous plague that falls

Many of them were the home of sacred relics of saints and martyrs, so thousands of Christians traveled to certain churches to “seek pardon for sins or pay homage to a particular saint” (Fiero 153). Similar to being cured through Jesus’s miracles in antiquity, there were also some individuals that believed sleeping near a saint’s tomb would lift them of their ailment (Fiero 153). These extensive journeys were called pilgrimages, and there were four routes that linked the cities of France together through the shrine of Santiago de Compostela (Fiero 153). Countless people traveled great distances in order to visit the Saint, and this caused a boom of competition between parishes to be more flashy and attractive in order to draw more business (Fiero 153). Newer churches were more Romanesque, because they proved to be more stable and ultimately more long lasting. This is a prime example of the immense power that faith and religion had on life during the premodern era. People’s devotion to God’s ability to heal the sick and absolve sins spurred a new economic and architectural