How to Be Both: Individuating Religious Hybridity in Material Culture in Early Medieval Gaul

The concept of cultural hybridity is considered to be an outstanding starting point for the analysis of cultural contacts and mixing in modern history. This paper proposes to use this concept to investigate how paganism and traditional practices interacted with each other during the so-called conversion period in Western Europe, from the third to the seventh century. Using the anthropological conception of religious hybridity as a methodological tool, this paper will investigate some examples of material sources in order to understand how local cultural identity interacted with the new religion to build a mixed religious interpretation, one that was neither pagan nor Christian, but something different. Taking examples from religious structures in Gaul and relating it to the written documentation, I will individuate how people’s agency was important in shaping their own faith and the role it had in the period of Christianisation.