Thursday 26 May 2011

Medieval graffiti website

The Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey is pleased to announce that their website is now fully updated and revised. The new site now contains the first elements of a visual catalogue that showcases some of the more interesting and unusual discoveries made by the project. It is currently organised by parish but, as the site expands, we hope to make all the information searchable by subject as well as by site. The new site also contains a link to the new Medieval Graffiti twitter feed - which allows you to learn about new discoveries as they are made. Real-time church archaeology.
Some churches have apotropaic marks and other esoteric graffiti, which whilst not actually Pagan, derives from the pagan worldview which the Christian order inherited. To quote Ronald Hutton:
medieval and early modern Europeans constructed their world-picture out of materials taken from both Christianity and ancient paganism, making a mixture of both which they believed to be a form of Christianity.

2 comments:

argripton said...

"Medieval and early modern Europeans constructed their world-picture out of materials taken from both Christianity and ancient paganism, making a mixture of both which they believed to be a form of Christianity." ???
Not strictly true - Christianity was formed from ancient paganism/astrology - an allegoric fantasy like many that had gone before. The only difference being the unequalled level of successful subterfuge that the Christian story attained.

Yewtree said...

Early Christianity was a blend of Judaism and pagan mystery religions - I think that's quite widely accepted among scholars.

It's also possible that it included a hefty dollop of astrology, though as far as I know that is only a theory, and not so widely accepted.

However, Ronald Hutton was talking there about medieval Christianity, which was a blend of Christianity and earlier pagan ideas.

What do you mean, "successful subterfuge"? Do you mean "pretending to be true"? If so, I agree.