Clergymen Between The Cultures of Church and Village: Conflict and Cooperation In Late Medieval Hungary

Abstract

The paper aims to explore the scenario of lay-clerical conflicts and their negotiations by reading petitions of pardon handed in to the papal curia in the late fifteenth and early 16th century from the Kingdom of Hungary. In course of the negotiation of violent conflicts, which very often entailed the killing of a priest, ordinary laymen and members of the rural pastoral clergy alike fabricated stories which they thought would best serve the forgiveness of their sins. However, as the paper argues, the act of petitioning to the papal curia in fact served other ‘non-official’ functions in the process of conflict negotiation. In the gaps of these short narratives we can detect that lay-clerical everyday disputes were in fact neighborhood conflicts deriving from their close co-existence.