• Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Well apart from kings or nobility or landowners or city authorities, town authorities…

    Were you thinking of in terms of a king acting by the grace of God or something? Because there definitely were secular authorities in the typical sense.

    • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      All of those needed to play ball with the church. Let me remind you of all that pope and counterpope business, all the religious wars in Europe, the Crusades, excommunications as power moves, the church as landouners, etc.

      Secular means separation of church and state. That didn’t exist in medieval Europe. Otherwise, the enlightenment wouldn’t have been necessary.

      • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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        1 day ago

        Church was a limit to secular athority, not the authority itself, in most places.

        • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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          22 hours ago

          I think you’re confusing “secular” with “worldly”. Secular means that the church and the state are separated. Or that the state is neutral regarding religion. That definetly wasn’t the case in medieval Europe. That’s part of why the US/French revolution happened.

            • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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              20 hours ago

              From Wikipedia:

              Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin saeculum, ‘worldly’ or ‘of a generation’), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion.

              So, while you might be technically correct as it comes to what the literal translation is: that’s not how it’s used in political discourse.

              • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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                19 hours ago

                Are you unable to accept being wrong?

                This is exactly how it is and was used when talking about middle ages. There were secular and religious power, secular and religious courts, and in religious courts church only held authority in spiritual and religous matters. Exceptions to these rules are prince-bishops in HRE and other such examples (papal states) where bishops or pope were civil rulers of secular prinicpalities/states.