Book on Medieval World View -- Title?

I can't remember the name of a fascinating book I read 40 years ago, assigned within college World Folklore course taught in 1980s
included discussion of religious relics
Description of revered religious figure literally pulled to pieces by devout crowd trying to get their own relic
Medieval view on science/four humors, etc
European focus
Popular reactions to plague -- remedies, beliefs
Scholarly book, maybe from first half of 20th century
possibly translated into English

Possibly A Distant Mirror: the calamitous 14th-century, by Barbara Tuchman?

Perhaps A World Lit Only by Fire?

Thanks for the two suggestions, but both are recent. The book I read was already an old book when I read it. It dealt with a period before the Renaissance primarily.

I have been able to reconstruct that I read the book upon recommendation by Theodore Gaster, who was a prominent professor of Religion and Comparative Mythology at Columbia/Barnard. I was researching the Black Death, and the book discussed ideas such as rich people grinding up precious jewels to drink, having connected wealth with a higher likelihood of survival (without understanding that ventilation, space and hygiene were what was really helping. The book showed how completely different the way of understanding the world was and argued that historical studies alone were inadequate to allow someone to understand the distant past.

Barnard, not "Columbia Barnard".

Lilithcat, class of '70

;-)

You might want to look at the list of books tagged "medieval history": http://www.librarything.com/tag/medieval+history

A couple of possibilities there:

The Making of the Middle Ages, by R. W. Southern (early '50s)
Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, by Henri Pirenne (1927) (this is also, as you thought it might be, a translation)

Many thanks to Lilithcat! An investigation of The Making of the Middle Ages led me to The Waning of the Middle Ages, by John Huizinga which is ringing the most bells yet. And if it is not the book, it looks like a fascinating read in and of itself.

Walked the Barnard campus last summer to take pictures for an ailing friend. Wonderful memories of my time as an undergrad. Wished I had appreciated someone like Professor Gaster more!

>7 MattConnors:

Let us know if that's it!

Also The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis touches on many of those same themes and might be worth looking at even if it's not what you were searching for.