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Iconoclasm as a movement began within the Eastern Christian Byzantine church in the early 8th century, following a series of heavy military reverses against the Muslims. There was a Christian movement in the eighth and ninth centuries against the worship of imagery, caused by worry that the art might be idolatrous. [4]
The Catholic Church's peak of authority over all European Christians and their common endeavours of the Christian community — for example, the Crusades, the fight against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula and against the Ottomans in the Balkans — helped to develop a sense of communal identity against the obstacle of Europe's deep political ...
Medieval technology refers to the technology used in medieval Europe under Christian rule. After the Renaissance of the 12th century, medieval Europe saw a radical change in the rate of new inventions, innovations in the ways of managing traditional means of production, and economic growth. [103]
The gradual rise of Germanic Christianity was, at times, voluntary, particularly among groups associated with the Roman Empire. From the 6th century, Germanic tribes were converted (or re-converted from Arianism) by missionaries of the Catholic Church. [4] [5] Many Goths converted to Christianity as individuals outside the Roman Empire.
Rodney Stark writes that medieval Europe's advances in production methods, navigation, and war technology "can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason. That new technologies and techniques would always be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith.
[279] [280] The medieval papacy gained authority in every domain of European life as it gradually came to resemble the monarchies of its day. [ 281 ] [ 282 ] Canon law became a huge, highly complex, system of laws that omitted Christianity's earlier principles of inclusivity.
However, as James W. Fernandez says, it is a mistake to identify Christianity only with its European version. [421] Jules Rosette shows how ritual symbolization is the training ground, the interface, for the translation of the African into the Christian, "how ritual vocabulary translates tradition into new practices".
Christian polemics and apologetics in Europe during the Middle Ages were primarily directed inwards, either against "heretics," such as the Cathars, or between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. A subset of polemic and apologetic activity continued against Judaism and Islam, both openly in Christian Europe and more circumspectly in the pre ...