Inaugural lecture

Inaugural lecture by Professor John H Arnold: 'Believing in Medieval Belief: Gibbon, Latour and what we do with Religion'. We have inherited certain narratives and assumptions about religion and faith, one being a patronizing belief in ‘belief’, as the French theorist Bruno Latour puts it. This notion of unquestioning credulity is founded upon a form of medievalism, the idea of a past ‘age of faith’. Current debates around religion and science, religion and politics, are often implicitly and sometimes unwittingly framed by this interpretive inheritance.We owe these narratives to Enlightenment writers such as Edward Gibbon, who depicted the Christian middle ages as dominated by ‘a softness of temper’ and accompanying credulity among ordinary people. In his recent writings on religion Latour in fact shares an element of this medievalism, albeit with its values reversed, as he invests the medieval past with a unity of community and belief that religious speech has lost in modern times