I never meant to imply that they got EVERYTHING from the clergy, or not even most things. The cleric in a little village was likely not even literate himself. I meant that the clergy were seen as authority figures in areas of knowledge, both because they were representatives of God and because anybody with any formal education, except maybe for a few nobles, was a member of the clergy.
--- Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> At 12:42 PM 5/30/2008, Chris Doss wrote:
> \>
>
> This ain't necessarily so. Carlo Ginzburg has shown
> how deep and
> wide the peasantry's own ideas about things could be
> rooted. Take
> Menocchio, the subject of Ginzburg's book The Cheese
> and the
> Worms. He had ideas about genesis that were formed
> largely
> independently of clerical guidance. This looks like
> as good an
> account as the canonical Genesis, but it still
> doesn't approach the
> level of proof we have that Jupiter exists:
>
>
> >"That in my opinion all was chaos, that is, earth,
> air, water, and
> >fire were all mixed together; and out of that bulk
> a mass formed -
> >just as cheese is made out of milk - and worms
> appeared in it, and
> >these were the angels. The most holy majesty
> decreed that these
> >should be God and the angels, and among that number
> of angels, there
> >was also God, he too having been created out of
> that mass at the
> >same time, and he was made Lord."
>
>
>
>
>
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