The Holy Greyhound

Book excerpt: Taking as his starting point the documentation of this cult in the thirteenth century by an inquisitor who attempted to stamp it out, Jean-Claude Schmitt asks a variety of questions, both historical and anthropological, about the nature of popular culture in the European past. How did the legend arrive in the Dombes? Was it brought by literary sources, or do its origins lie hidden in a past of common oral cultures? How does this particular cult relate to a variety of analogous traditions, whether sanctioned by the church or exclusively popular, of which evidence survives? How did the peasant culture of the thirteenth century relate to the official and literate cultures? An extra dynamic is provided by the author's tracing of the cult in this place from the thirteenth century to its last practitioners in the twentieth, and his exploration of the changes in the cult over time. --