Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen ed. by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (review)

This is a particularly fine tribute to a particularly fine scholar. No respectable medievalist can fail to come to terms with the impressive and stimulating work of John Van Engen, which has been outlined as an appendix. This festschrift and Van Engen’s work reflect several important principles, each of which is worthy of consideration and acceptance. First, the scholar must become familiar with the grain of historiographical understanding and, once familiar with the well-worn pathways, intentionally go against the grain and chart out new pathways. Second, medievalists must take religion seriously. Third, Van Engen’s work and the essays in this collection warn about the propensity to sort medieval matters into approved and disapproved taxonomies. Fourth, while the concept of reform may be vexatious, it cannot be dismissed. Fifth, the value of a counterfactual principle should be applied to the entire Middle Ages. Sixth, the goal of scholarship should be neither to defend nor condemn, but to understand and explain. Seventh, ‘Christianity’, in the later Middle Ages especially, represents a multi-layered complexity filled with options, opportunities, and otherness which defies simplification.

The volume is divided into four foci: the idea of Christianisation; twelfth-century culture; Jews and Christian society; and late medieval religious life. The essays are evenly important, generally well written, suggestive, signposting additional research possibilities: they are a credit to the editors and worthy of presentation to Van Engen. It is impossible in the allotted space to say something about each contribution. I have therefore chosen to reflect on matters that are of personal interest.

Lisa Wolverton’s essay on the Christianisation of Bohemia is a model of solid scholarship and critical evaluation. Her contribution, along with those of David Mengel and Marcela Perrett, bring attention to Bohemia, which has for far too long been allowed to languish on the shoals of the mainstream of medieval studies. Perrett’s essay is another contribution to an expanding field of investigation into the vernacular sources of the Hussite period. Curiously, she does not mention the analysis of Příbram’s polemic against the Táborite priests published by this reviewer in 2011.

Another essay that stands out for its erudition is R. I. Moore’s on the Cathar Middle Ages as an historiographical problem. Against naysayers, it is essential to acknowledge that there really were heretics in the Middle Ages, those who deliberately rejected the authority and teachings of the official Church. Robert Lerner did rightly dispatch the phantom of the Free Spirit heretics a generation ago, but Cathar, Waldensian, and Hussite heretics really did prowl the dimly lit hallways of medieval Europe. The insistence on affirming that heretics were simply created by inquisitors and prelates is not persuasive. Howard Kaminsky was wrong and Jan Hus, for example, was a heretic and so were some of his disciples, the appropriately named Hussites. Moore’s essay has historiographical value and should be carefully read. Christine Caldwell Ames’s contribution is also valuable in this respect. Moore rightly points out that the collection, Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’Inquisition (CEPAM, 1998), marks the resetting of the historiographical clock in the study of heresy. This volume is an instructive lesson of how ‘nonsense in academic garb should be dealt with’. This is how Moore describes Norman Cohn’s takedown of Margaret Murray’s thesis about a witch cult and his observation continues to have wide applicability.

Translated primary source documents accompanying several of the contributions are welcome and useful. I find endnotes tedious, and contrary to the objections of all too many publishing houses, notes at the foot of the page are preferred and ever so much more useful. The volume might have included a photograph of the man who has inspired...