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The notion of ‘popular religion’ has played an important role in a ‘religious history’ that has been strongly influenced by the preconceptions of authors closely or more distantly associated with the Catholic Church, for whom the legitimate forms of ‘religion’ must necessarily ‘descend’ from the ‘top’ — the clerics — to the ‘bottom’ — the Christian ‘people’, and thus be ‘popularized’ at the risk of distortions that are described as ‘superstitions’. But it is difficult to define the notions of ‘people’ and ‘religion’. What we mean today by ‘religion’ is not appropriate for talking about the Middle Ages. The author proposes instead to use the anthropological notion of ‘culture’ to study the distribution and transformations of collective and individual practices and beliefs between three different sociological poles: the village, the castle and the town.