University of Exeter Press
Paganism Persisting
A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity
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- 228 Pages
Paganism in Europe was not defeated by Christianity: it never went away. From the fourth century to the twentieth, against the background of a largely Christian culture, people repeatedly attempted to revive various kinds of pre-Christian religion – beliefs and practices that we have come to label as ‘paganism’.
Ancient paganism did not survive the Middle Ages in its original form; this book tells the story of the persistence of elements of paganism and the pagan idea through Europe’s pagan revivals, from Byzantine Greece to medieval Eastern Europe and Renaissance Florence, from eighteenth-century Norwich to revolutionary Paris and Edwardian England. While some of these revivals are well known and others are almost entirely forgotten, they reveal the rich diversity of interpretations of paganism – and how those interpretations have been conditioned by the surrounding culture.
Revived paganisms ranged from the austerely rational to the earnestly romantic, from the mystical and occult to the stridently nationalistic. Paganism Persisting reveals European paganism’s long afterlife, up to and including the emergence of modern paganism as a mass movement in the twentieth century. The authors are both historians of religion specializing, respectively, in the intellectual history of the idea of paganism and in the development of popular religion and folklore. This book has much to offer to anyone interested in European cultural history, the history of ideas and religious studies.
Paganism Persisting is written in an admirably lucid and accessible style that will be attractive to general readers while the subject matter also makes it important to scholars. It is based on a thorough reading of the relevant secondary sources, with a regular leavening of primary material, which is a balance and mixture appropriate to a survey volume of this sort.
Prof. Ronald Hutton, author of Pagan Britain and The Witch
Paganism Persisting makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the various pagan ‘renaissances’ in European history from Antiquity to the present. Young and Douglas not only provide a sophisticated survey of the scholarship, they also provide a fresh way of looking at this complex subject.
Owen Davies, author of Grimoires and The Oxford History of Witchcraft and Magic
Acknowledgement
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The First (and Last) Pagans: Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Dealing with Past and Present Paganism in Medieval Western Christendom
3. Pagan Renaissances
4. Paganism in the Enlightenment
5. Poets and Priests: The Victorian Era
6. The Emergence of Modern Paganism
Epilogue : Pagan Pasts, Pagan Futures?
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
- 228 Pages