The publication includes books: "Problems of Medieval Folk Culture" and "Culture and Society of Medieval Europe through the Eyes of Contemporaries." The focus of the study of the first book is the worldview and peculiarities of the religiosity of illiterate commoners, "people without archives." Attempts to reconstruct their culture are fraught with the difficulty that the historian is able to extract indications of it mainly or exclusively indirectly - through the analysis of texts that have come out of the pen of the educated. The book examines the cult of saints in its common sense, the image of the other world, as it was seen by medieval visionaries, and two conflicting versions of the Last Judgment, popular theology. Polemicizing with the thesis of M.M. Bakhtin on the carnival-laughter nature of medieval folk culture, the author emphasizes the closest connection between laughter and fear in it. The book "Culture and Society of Medieval Europe through the Eyes of Contemporaries" is based on the study of moral "examples" (exempla) of the 13th century, which were included in the texts of the sermons of monks of mendicant orders. In the texts of these works, it is possible, in particular, to reveal a peculiar paradox of the interweaving of eternity and time, the space of the other world with the space of the earth. The formulation of the problem of folk culture opens the way to the knowledge of those layers of medieval world vision, which until recently remained out of the field of view of historians.