Socio-Cultural Concept of the Medieval Rural Community: Drawing the Conclusions

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Abstract:

The rural, village community has always aroused and generated a keen interest of scholars as no other social problems. Approaches to its studying vary. Nowadays, the mediaeval rural community has become a frequent subject of detailed analysis on the pages of many academic books and articles. Their analysis has helped the author of this article to shape a science-based concept of rural community by the newest attitudes to cognitive sciences. It represents the cohesion of this concept and conceptions of collective and collectivity, neighborhood and solidarity. Many sides of life in medieval village are reconstructed to a considerable degree as hypothetical subject. Nevertheless, they allow to affirm that the rural community and parish (which can be examined as an alternative invariant of community) remained informal unities with their distinguishing features. It was independent of them, whether they coincided fully or partially. The main aspect that transformed the unity of village inhabitants into the real community, was in sociocultural and psychological commonality, which came out naturalistically.

At the same time, the author defines the rural community based on the approach to rural community as an organization of village inhabitants, united by kinship, relations, and neighborhood for regulation of social and economic, including self-governing and class interconnections, cultural and public, ideological and religious connections of community members owing to formation of psychological collectivity. This definition helps to develop the social-cultural concept of mediaeval rural community, which is examined as formal and non-formal social unity of village inhabits. The proposed concept foreordains the further perspectives of studying community problems of the Middle Ages.

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