The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul by Lisa Kaaren Bailey (review)

There is a vibrant universe tucked inside this slender book, which is dedicated to the experiences and perspectives of lay Christians in Gaul from roughly 400 to 700. The challenges of such a project are obvious: it is hard to know what anyone actually believes, all the more so when most of your evidence was crafted by ecclesiastical experts. But Bailey demonstrates that this familiar critique is in some ways overly cautious. There may be a lot we cannot know about the life of the laity in Gaul, but there is also a lot we can know, and her study examines the official and unofficial engagements (chap. 1), sacred spaces (chap. 2), urban topographies (chap. 3), rituals (chap. 4), behaviors (chap. 5), and beliefs (chap. 6) through which lay Christians co-created their religious culture in Late Antiquity.

Historians of post-imperial Gaul will find that Bailey has reshuffled the evidence they thought they knew (sermons, councils, hagiography, formularies, epigraphy, and to a lesser extent law codes and histories) into a rich and unexpected portrait. We meet laypersons whose Christianity could be variously characterized as engaged, inventive, or intense. Some of them could outperform their clergy in asceticism. Others developed competing interpretations of ethical Christian behaviors. We also meet laypersons who identified as Christian but had other priorities, too, like family, work, or civic pride. This is reason enough to be excited about Bailey's study, but the book works for non-experts, too: if you are looking for something for your undergraduates that does justice to the diversity of lay Christian experience in the early Middle Ages, this is the book to assign. After reading it, they—and we historians, too—will be much warier of the concept of "average [!] Christians." The Christian Gaul of Bailey's book is much too multi-dimensional for us to feel comfortable with such a flat generalization anymore.

How have we overlooked these worlds for so long? Cultural historians have been analyzing texts in this way for decades, reading them—as Bailey does—on the logic that texts are built in conversation with audiences and competing conceptual frameworks, and so there will always be hints of real situations that an author seeks to shape. What helps Bailey read as sharply as she does here are two crucial premises that are currently transforming the histories of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The first is that social groups in this period were not homogeneous. Rio, Patzold, and Le Jan (for example) have cracked open the categories of "unfree," "episcopal," and "elite" to show us just how varied and variable the members of these classes were in Gaul. The second premise—which the work of Bowes, Maxwell, and Rebillard (among others) has validated for other late antique societies—is that diverse groups of lay Christians could be active participants in their religious culture, in private spheres but also more publicly, as congregants, donors, exemplars, and interlocutors.

So in taking seriously the possibility that the Gallic laity were a diverse and engaged group, Bailey uncovers a fascinating panorama of lay Christian perspectives. A citizen of Tours named Monegund left her husband to form an ascetic household in a room near the basilica of Saint Martin—but she never officially became a nun. The stately city of Trier welcomed pilgrims to its cathedral complex, but even here Christianity was multifocal: there were many shrines and burials ad sanctos scattered beyond the city center. The Lyon tombstone of a merchant named Agapus commemorated him as a "bay of the afflicted and port of the needy," twining his commercial and Christian activities together (something Gaul's hagiographers never did). The tombstone of a child in Vienne asked his parents to console themselves because he was enjoying eternal life, whereas other mourners envisioned the dead among the stars, in the company of the saints, or comfortably at peace. And a resident of...