Work and faith in the Middle Age

lexical and cognitive reflections

Abstract

The aim of this article is to socialize reflections on possible relationships established by medieval, religious and Catholic man, between his life of faith and his work, either denying it or overestimating it in his religious practice. Thus, work will not only be understood as part of life and routine, but as a builder of an ideology to be followed, which blends religious and social experience. We theoretically anchor our study on Cognitive Semantics with respect to the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2002 [1980]; 1999; Lakoff, 1987) in its most recent developments. The data collection followed the lexical and interpretative search, semantic-cognitivist, in scientific texts, historiographic and theological, on the conceptualizations of work in the Middle Ages; Thus, we observe how the construction of discourse on this theme can offer us lexical and semantic clues about the main forms and understanding of what work meant for this subject in its context. Other scholars considered here were: Le Goff (2013), Houtart (1982), De Masi (2001), Dreher (2013), Aquino (2014), among others. Some results point to the following metaphorical conceptualizations of work: RELIGIOUS WORK IS SOCIAL PRIVILEGE, WORK IS EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP, WORK IS PAYMENT. The present study allowed the perception that how some conceptualization processes occurred, through the mapping between different domains of knowledge, be they historical, social or religious.