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within Christian Europe; but it also spread certain unifying key ideas and the names of key authors who symbolized different schools of interpretations. One of these key ideas was the claim that religious faith was a private matter. This notion was formulated by several authors; the most famous were Martin Luther and Jean Calvin. Luther formulated the first, more obedient and passive challenge to the established doctrine that religious faith was demonstrated in acts – generally by participation in public ceremonies and sacraments. Since sacraments could not be
attention. Brideservice was seen as the selling of women. Christian life required, they insisted – averting their eyes from Spanish examples – that each married couple live with their issue in a single and separate dwelling. Women’s kin were no longer to interfere in marriages, for marriage was not an alliance between families but a solemn sacrament between individuals, transforming them into one flesh, binding each to each in Christian duty. 38 All pagan rituals were of course forbidden. Nor were any Indians to be trusted with Christian paraphernalia in their houses
Carolingians, that is, Charlemagne and his successors too, instilled into the societies and cultures they ruled a momentum for Christianization that demanded of lay individuals a more personal sense of religious responsibility. Charlemagne meant to inculcate New Testament spirituality as well as some of the practices of Old Testament piety. 78 Capitularies, letters and responses to them show, once again, how much this man wanted to know about what was going on, and how he set about getting the answers. Baptism was the foundational sacrament in that it made a person
early medieval world. The Church as an institution might claim to have a monopoly on the interpretation of scripture and the administration of sacraments, but around these cores there was significant variety across Europe in the practice of Christianity, with a multitude of what Peter Brown called ‘micro-Christendoms’. 96 In the context of Britain and Ireland, this meant that belief was expressed in a variety of ways even before the arrival of the vikings in the ninth century. In the seventh century, there had been significant differences between the so-called ‘Roman