EUROPE IS A combination of many and diverse cultures. However, in the Middle Ages the powerful reach of the Christian religion imposed an ideology which united European society under a common and coherent understanding of its physical surroundings, social order, and the power of the rulers. Flourishing other cultures, such as those of the Jews and Muslims in southern Europe, were given a secondary place under the growing articulation of society under predominantly Christian rulers. The scope of our task is to analyse why and how Christianity attained this leading position in the Middle Ages and, in this sense, became an ideology: a set of beliefs or principles organizing the whole of a society. Focusing especially on southern Europe, we wish to analyse the ways Christian ideology adapted to the evolution of social and economic circumstances during the medieval millennium, combining with diverse bases of thought and adapting these to relevant social groups. Christian ideology underwrote collective understandings of society's memory and orientated the narratives of identity expressed by otherwise disparate medieval communities. Using case studies grounded in perspectives from southern Europe, and thus focusing our work on Western (Roman) Christendom as opposed to the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, this volume interrogates the workings of ideology in the medieval world, with a view to complicating and enriching scholarly understanding of its diverse and sophisticated effects.

Drivers of Christian Ideology

In 1974, Gonzalo Puente Ojea published the work Ideología e historia: La formación del Cristianismo como fenómeno ideológico, stating that he began from the “conviction that without an ‘ideological reading’ it is impossible to reveal the ‘sense of history’.” For the historian, ideology should not be a tool but rather a perspective that informs the subject of study. In other words, in conducting analysis of the reasons for the behaviour of the men and women who preceded us, the focus of the study must be placed on the ideology that dictated what was accepted as normal and correct in the society in question.