<b>Language, knowledge, and mystical mediation: magic, clergy and intervention on the nature in the quotidian and representations in Medieval West</b> - doi: 10.4025/actascieduc.v34i1.15881

Abstract

The Reading of documents of ecclesiastical source produced during Middle Ages provides the very clear percept of the presence of various categories of mediators between the natural world and mystical forces, in the daily routine of the western men. On the one hand, there were the wizards, expert supposedly endowed with special knowledge, who used as a resource various forms of exercise of divinatory arts and techniques of manipulation of elements of nature. During Middle Ages the ecclesiastical discourse searched opposing to their actions the knowledge and the achievements of the ‘true’ agents of sacred one, those who were organized in an ordo apart of the rest of society, ordoclericorum, enjoyed the privilege of access to the reading and writing of Latin. The concept of the clergy with which the Christian Church intended to qualify their members brought implicitly a cultural value which unified and distinguished them from the first ones. However, in the eyes of the people, the magical agents, as much as the clergies were endowed with specialized knowledge which granted to them the exercise of strange powers to the common mortals and made it possible for them controlling impersonal forces capable of altering the course of events. It is our intention to discuss the relationship between language, knowledge, and mystical Mediation in the current representations of magical agents and clergies in Middle Ages.