Presentation
The written sources that enable us to study the worldviews and conceptions of the inhabitants of the Western countryside during the High Middle Ages present a double documentary, social and cultural bias: they emanate in the main from a restricted and privileged group of the population, the educated clerics. Archbishop Agobard of Lyon's work on hail and thunder, written in the 810s, serves as the starting point for a micro-historical investigation, based on the composite nature of the treatise, both a theological treatise aimed at Agobard's peers and at the ideological training of educated clergy, and a pastoral manual, written to help priests confront the faithful in their work of conviction and preaching. The archbishop employs two modes of rationality. He uses theological reasoning to demonstrate God's omnipresence and omnipotence in the dynamics of Nature, and he uses investigation and logic to refute the widespread belief among the Lyonnais population in the causality of bad weather. These were based on the action of humans capable of manipulating the weather, both negatively, by provoking thunderstorms and hailstorms, and positively, by defending communities of inhabitants against these malignant storms.
The treatise allows us to study the interpretations and representations of the physical world among ecclesiastical elites and rural populations. Without providing an ideal production emanating directly from the peasants, this point of view offers a starting point for a systematic investigation into the Christian inclusion of small rural worlds and the cultural traditions produced by this cultural embedding. In this confrontation, the historian can also hope to uncover the non-Christian components of the "little tradition", which serves as the basis for a rationality specific to the peasant world(s). We use the concept of the "peasant backworld" to designate, without any historiographical or ideological a priori, the cultural field in which these tensions between Christian and non-Christian ideas of Nature play out.
