The Ages of Faith: Popular Religion in Late Medieval England and Europe, and: The Church in the Later Middle Ages (review)

Probably most widely known as the general editor of the English edition of Documents of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990) and as the author of the best short history of the general councils available in English, Norman Tanner is a more broad-gauged church historian than those two works might well suggest. The two more recent books reviewed here make that perfectly clear. And they serve also to draw our attention to the fact that he had earlier immersed himself in a tightly focused, empirically based study of religious life in late-medieval England, an investigative effort that resulted in the important monograph The Church in Late Medieval Norwich: 1370-1523 (Toronto, 1984).

The two volumes reviewed here reflect, build upon, and extend that impressive body of work. The first, The Ages of Faith, a collection of previously published articles, chapters, and reviews, is rather disparate in nature—in two respects. Disparate in that, while half the pieces reprinted are works of primary scholarship, the other half are shorter, slighter, more broadly interpretative essays intended for a more general readership and published, accordingly, in such venues as The Month, America, The Church Times, and The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. These essays are disparate, too, in the range of topics they address, from "Sources of Popular Religion in Late Medieval England" to "Recognition of the First Seven Ecumenical Councils by Late Medieval and Later General Councils of the Western Church," and from "Making Merry in the Middle Ages" to "The Study of English Medieval Recluses in the Twentieth Century." That notwithstanding, the volume does not lack a center of intellectual gravity, and it clearly lies in the substantial clusters of pieces focused either on the history of the general councils or on the history of religion in late-medieval Norwich. The author's interests, it would seem, are engaged most heavily in conciliar history and in the history of late-medieval religious practice. And if the former interest tugs him in the direction of a concern with the institutional Church as its history unfolds along the broader European axis, the latter, calling as it does for carefully constructed, empirically based description, nudges him toward a tightening of focus and leads him to dwell on the English and especially the East Anglian religious scene.

Both sets of dominant interests eventuate here in a set of substantial and interesting contributions to our understanding of the complexities of later medieval church history. And both are also reflected in The Church in the Later Middle Ages, a volume contributed to the multivolume I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church, and feed into the book's central strength. That strength stems from the author's conscious commitment to balancing a traditional institutional approach, proceeding as it were from above and focusing on pope, clerical hierarchy, and monastic orders, with a more gritty approach from below, exploiting what can be gleaned from a myriad of documentary sources (wills, visitation records, popular spiritual reading, and the like) and focusing, above all, on the laity and its characteristic modes of religiosity. And if the former focus is wide enough to embrace the Eastern Orthodox churches and the relationship of Christendom with the non-Christian world, the latter is able to include within its purview the phenomena of heresy and dissent and the broader world of intellect and culture.

We are provided here, then, with rather rich and various fare, and it is appropriate to ask what conclusions we can draw from it. At the outset Tanner commits himself to understanding the period in its own right rather than in terms of what...