Deceiving beliefs and practices: the dangers of deceiving information for Christian Medieval communities

NEYRA, ANDREA VANINA

Besançon

Otro; Deceiving Information Fake News and Conspiracy Theories from Antiquity to Our Days; 2022

Maison des sciences de l'homme et de l'environnement Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Université de Franche-Comté

Within the context of the Christianization of Central Europe, two main trends can be identified in the 10th and 11th centuries: on the one hand, the attempts of the Church at converting new individuals and peoples located mainly in the margins of the Ottonian Empire (i. e. Slavic peoples and magyars) where institutional ventures were at hand in order to expand the control over the regions, and, on the other hand, the efforts for deepening the knowledge of the Christian doctrine and cult among peoples already christianized. Both situations represented some kind of danger for the Christian communities. However, the sources point at some specific cases of uprisings against the established institutions as well as at superstitions ‒the continuation of non-Christian practices and beliefs‒ as a threat within. In the first case, individuals could be mislead to abandon the faith and go back to paganism due to reasons outside religious ones. In the second case, baptized individuals were not only in error (many, without even recognising the difference between their superstitious activities and orthodoxy), but they could also, by their example, lead others to fall into the same fault. This presentation seeks to discuss these subtil, often obscure and non-public/explicit dissemination of alleged deceiving information, putting at risk the unity of the Christian communities, as well as the strategies applied in order to avoid such threats.