Abstract
The fourth lecture concludes the survey in the long term, placing it in the context of two opposing movements within Church and society. The Christian inclusion of rural communities in the 8th-9th centuries was aimed at securing the monopoly of God and his Church over the productivity of nature and the warding off of crop failures. This medieval Christianization of the countryside, which took place at different rates and with different regional characteristics, reached its general conclusion in the West in the 12th-13th centuries. At the same time, however, the encroachment of the countryside and its inhabitants was accompanied by religious and social exclusion of groups and individuals who were discriminated against because of their origin and otherness (foreigners), their gender (women), their religion, or their situation on the bangs of established society (wanderers and beggars). In the 11th and especially from the 12th century onwards, magic was henceforth interpreted by the Church as a culpable error that came under the heading of heresy as a culpable error par excellence. This canonical qualification paved the way for the excommunication and criminalization of individuals, leading from the 14th century onwards to the confinement and persecution of minorities (lepers, Jews) and, in the 15th-17th centuries, to the hunting down of so-called witches and sorcerers.
