The Genre of Trolls - Doria

despite the efforts of the clergy to give their parishioners even the tiniest
smattering of knowledge of the basics of the Christian faith, the sanction
to actually use religious discourse with authority was nevertheless restricted
to church officials. Linked as it was to the institutionalized setting of the
church, enshrined in the rituals of worship and the subtleties of theological
learning, religious discourse could still be legitimately accessed, employed
and interpreted by ordained priests alone (cf. Foucault 1999: 68, 70, 90;
Foucault 2001: 38–39). Thus, lacking the authority to wield this discourse
with impunity, laymen might not have counted it as entirely their own, regardless
of their acquaintance with it. This is pure speculation; at the time
of collection some of the limitations on access to religious discourse were
indeed being relaxed with the repeal of the law against private religious
meetings in 1870; this is visible in the emergence of lay preaching, for example,
though this change did not occur without opposition from some
members of the clergy. The main objection against lay preaching was that
it could potentially undermine the position of the vicar as the leader of the
congregation (Dahlbacka 1987: 112–114). Another point of contention was
the interpretation of the discourse; in the parish of Vörå there was a clash
between the vicar and a Baptist preacher in 1880, for instance (Åkerblom
1963: 159). The point I want to make is that lay access to religious discourse
was a very recent phenomenon in the period studied, and people might
have been slightly uncomfortable with this new-found freedom, not knowing
what to make of it. Some restrictions were nevertheless imposed on the
appropriation of religious discourse, and these are still in force today. Not
just anybody can officiate at ceremonies, for example, at least not in the
Lutheran church.
In Menocchio’s case, the relative alienness of religious discourse was
combined with the lingering presence of a pre-Christian peasant religion
(Ginzburg 1988: 168–169), but such a link is certainly not possible to posit
on the basis of my material, nor would it be my intention to establish such
a connection.
Moreover, the adoption of the language of the Bible might have been
avoided if it was perceived to imply bowing to its authority; in some circumstances
this may not have been desirable, for example when opposition
to the religious discourse was mounted. (Of course, the religious discourse
could conceivably be used to subvert its authority from within—there is no
simple correlation between intention, strategy and result.) Nevertheless,
Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity and Power 211