Premium
The early medieval secular: spectrum and strategies
Author(s) -
O'Brien Conor
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
early medieval europe
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1468-0254
pISSN - 0963-9462
DOI - 10.1111/emed.12446
Subject(s) - secularity , secular variation , privilege (computing) , secular state , context (archaeology) , secular education , middle ages , variety (cybernetics) , history , period (music) , genealogy , sociology , law , ancient history , political science , politics , demography , archaeology , philosophy , aesthetics , mathematics , statistics
This special issue seeks to fill a gap by taking the first steps towards locating the early Middle Ages in the broader history of the secular. While it has generally been assumed that a division between religion and secular was impossible to make in the early medieval period, taken together the articles in this collection show a variety of early medieval seculars, all arising from a general assumption that distinctions could, indeed had to, be made between what was secular and what was not. The introduction proposes that scholars should think in terms of a spectrum of secularity; key to determining what sits within this spectrum must be the identification of secularizing strategies, i.e. attempts to draw a distinction between religious and secular in a particular context. Such an approach offers the possibility of a history of the secular that does not privilege one time or place .