Missachtung, Anerkennung, Kreativität - Exkommunizierte Laien im 13. Jahrhundert

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Katharina Mersch
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: Funded in 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439635158

From early Christian times onwards, individual sinners were excluded from the community to lead them back to God. The juridical concept of excommunication perpetuated this idea, drawing upon a threefold relationship significant for the medieval church relating the community, the individual and God to each other. This requires an analysis considering both religious and social history. Only the individual could take the guilt for their sins and assume their responsibility to God. The Christian community on the other hand was responsible to evaluate the peccability of the individuals actions and their inner relationship with God and to take measures to convert the sinner, the ultimate sanction being major excommunication affecting nearly all areas of life. To lift excommunication, the sinner was obliged to relate himself in a positive way to the community he was excluded from. Therefore, this study explores in a first step the legal basis for their activities and asks in a second step how they acted and behaved, focusing the 13^ century with its many legal innovations. The study focuses on those people who often tend to be neglected when the history of the Church is examined: the laity. The Christian community often was imagined as twofold, the laity being subject to clerical authority in different ways. With regard to this dualistic concept, excommunication was thought of as a ‘spiritual weapon’ enabling the clergy to prosecute laypeople in conflicts which from a modern perspective appear to have been shaped rather by political than by spiritual interests. The excommunicates’ biographies amalgamated in this book reflect this tension and demonstrate how laypeople - dukes, counts and townsmen - acted with regard to excommunication. Different genres of sources are compared on a broad base for the first time to consider how the laypeople solicited support from secular and ecclesiastical authorities, how they utilised canon law and signs of faith in favour of their own interests and against bishops, and how they managed to take part in divine services and other religious practices forbidden for excommunicates. Micro-perspective analysis committed to the wider perspective of social history can show that the excommunicates vividly acted within the Christian community they ought to be excluded from and that they had their own opinions on how ecclesiastical structures worked.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants