Medieval Christianity (review)

This volume is a worthy contribution to the series A People's History of Christianity, which attempts to view church history from the vantage point of the ordinary faithful, emphasizing the popular practice of religion as opposed to the study of the institutional Church, its hierarchy, and the theological concepts it developed and taught. The collection of essays seeks to build on the success of creative historians who have teased out fresh insights on popular religious conceptions and practices from long-studied sources. Most of its contributors succeed admirably in this undertaking, and the essays are solid and informative, even when "popular" aspects are difficult to root out. The volume is divided into five parts, each with two or three essays grouped thematically, and enlivened by more than eighty black-and-white illustrations interspersed throughout the essays and thirteen plates in full color. Some attention is paid to the first Christian millennium, but since sources for that period are truly scant, the search for popular religion does not yield a richly textured story until the final centuries of the medieval era. That notwithstanding, each essay contributes to a mosaic depicting Christianity as a vital part of the lives of medieval people, and the volume is well worth reading.

Daniel Bornstein edited the book; his introduction sets the stage for the various articles that follow. He also contributed an essay, "Relics, Ascetics, Living Saints," discussing how Christianity's attitudes toward the body, dramatically different from pagan and Jewish traditions, impacted popular belief and religiosity throughout the medieval era. The contributors are an assembly of eminent scholars, including Yitzhak Hen ("Converting the Barbarian West"), Bonnie Effros ("Death and Burial"), Richard Kieckhefer ("The Impact of Architecture"), André Vauchez ("Clerical Celibacy and the Laity"), Roberto Rusconi ("Hearing Woman's Sins"), Grado Merlo ("Heresy and Dissent"), Diane Webb ("Domestic Religion"), and Katherine French ("Parish Life"). All the essays are well written and informative; each makes a contribution to the volume's theme, and each in its own way is excellent and thought provoking. Particularly enjoyable are Gary Dickson's "Medieval Revivalism"; Theo Ruiz's "Jews, Muslims and Christians"; and R. N. Swanson's "The Burdens of Purgatory." Dickson focuses on the period from 1000 to 1500, taking a fresh look at various expressions of popular religious enthusiasm, from crusading to the "bonfires of the vanities" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the children's crusade, the flagellants, and more. He makes a convincing case that these enigmatic outbursts of popular religious ecstasy, episodes of revivalism, provide a meaningful glimpse into medieval popular devotion. Ruiz focuses on Iberia, unique in the Christian West for its religious pluralism. Islamic Spain, initially relatively tolerant of Christians and Jews, became less so as Christian enclaves in the north expanded. In Christian communities, as reconquest became crusade, an ideology of hostility toward the religious other developed and became ingrained, setting the stage for the tragic expulsions, at the close of the medieval period, of all Muslims and Jews, even some whose forebears had converted to Christianity. Swanson's essay shows how the doctrine of purgatory, embraced by the laity because it promised eventual salvation to all good Christians, promoted a series of changes in devotional practice in the later Middle Ages. These included the truly popular garnering of indulgences and an emphasis on providing Masses and prayers for oneself and deceased family members, both of which had far-reaching, unintended consequences.