Abstract

The article emphasizes the need to find new epistemological categories in order to redefine the relationship between medieval history and religious history, which has been experiencing a crisis for almost forty years. After providing a broad historiographical overview and some concrete examples, the author suggests restarting from fields of research, such as the history of religions, ethno-linguistics, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, that have been able to underline the great heuristic potential in the study of religious experience on the basis of new explicative paradigms of cultural change.