Yesterday at Medieval Religion reading group we discussed an intriguing 1990 essay by Susan Reynolds which argues the case for scholars being open to the possibility of atheism and non-belief in the European middle ages.

Reynolds gives a wide variety of examples of individuals who appear to be expressing not just heterodox beliefs, but an outright absence of belief in God or Christianity.

She presents her case as a corrective to prior scholarship that assumes that premodern people were fundamentally incapable of conceiving of un-belief (and in particular she criticises the notion that peasants were unable to think through and articulate challenges to belief).

Our group found it interesting reading this article in 2020, because a few of us felt like the scholarly conversation had moved on in a very different direction in the intervening 30 years to the earlier paradigm that Reynolds was critiquing.

Many medievalists who write on belief now emphasis the role of lay people, including those with no formal education, as active participants in medieval Christianity, and argue that these individuals could - and did - engage in subtle (and critical) thinking about their faith.

So the paradigm has moved on from seeing the medieval laity as passive recipients of institutional Christian instruction and discipline, to a more 'social' model. But in the process, we're perhaps less open to considering the possibility of individuals rejecting belief outright?

There was discussion in the group about how this might in part also be a response to popular medievalism - how lots of medieval-inspired media presents the Church a monolithic, repressive institution whose teachings the 'common people' don't actually believe in.

So academic medievalists have perhaps been keen to correct misrepresentations by emphasising the genuine importance of faith in medieval laypeoples' lives and their active participation in religion.

(This point wasn't discussed in the session but it also occurred to me afterwards: perhaps there was also a bit of a response to the more unpleasant manifestations of New Ath*ism in the 2000s, viz H*tchens and D*wkins?)

(At least in my case, it has definitely been a factor in shaping my own relationship with organised non-belief/atheism, as a non-believer myself)

ANYWAY this was an excessively long thread that should've been a blog post, but I really enjoyed the conversation about this article and I wanted to share it and see if folks on here had their own responses to it.