Eternal Light and Earthly Concerns: Belief and the Shaping of Medieval Society by Paul Fouracre (review)

Some of the most interesting topics in recent historiography are those which have been hiding in plain sight. Such is the focus of Paul Fouracre's brilliant and fascinating—if sometimes frustrating—new book. The topic in question is the lighting provided to medieval Western churches, not so much the practical lighting that might or might not have been used, but the devotional lights that were set upon altars. Here is the "eternal light" and the "belief" of the title: the requirement that a light should be kept "perpetually" alight in every Christian church (something firmly established, in theory at least, under the Carolingians, and possibly going back to sixthcentury church councils in the Iberian Peninsula).

The primary focus of the book is on the early and central Middle Ages—Fouracre is a distinguished early medievalist—and the "lights" under discussion in that period are mostly oil-burning lamps. The "earthly concerns" are thus the processes of supplying churches with oil. (Mostly oil: wax was also present but was not the predominant fuel for lighting until the later Middle Ages.) Here what has previously been taken for granted is brought dazzlingly into view: the amounts of oil needed to keep a flame continually alight are considerable. Thus, it was a massive, ongoing material need, and as Fouracre demonstrates, this need was inextricably intertwined with much wider social and economic processes: in the early Middle Ages, the changing fortunes of the oil trade with North Africa and, as the period progressed, the exercise of various kinds of lordly exaction to generate a steady flow of income directed toward the "lights." In certain areas of Europe, the need to provide "lights" produced a specific class of unfree people whose surplus labor was directed particularly to that task, sometimes including people who surrendered themselves into servitude to a church, said to have "given themselves to the lights" (this is in German-speaking lands in the ninth century). The constant requirement for oil (and later wax) was always one important factor within the wider socioeconomic mix. At other points one sees particular models of land tenure, in which lands were provided by monasteries and churches as "precarial" grants (in theory the land could be reclaimed at a later date), providing the institutions with a steady flow of rent, often specifically directed toward the upkeep of churches and the provision of lighting. In the later Middle Ages, the rise of confraternities was often a means by which lighting was furnished. Thus, whilst Fouracre is not arguing that the requirement for lights caused social change, he is dramatically demonstrating how lights provide a very powerful way of seeing the shifts in socioeconomic structure across the early to central Middle Ages.

This also provides Fouracre with an opportunity to comment on the wider historiographical arguments about social change across the medieval period, with a powerful and astute reading of the documentary sources across la longue durée and with a constant alertness to geographical variety. One of the unexpected benefits of the book is as a concise critique of several longstanding arguments, perhaps most importantly about the allegedly abrupt "feudal revolution" that predominantly francophone scholars (Georges Duby, Pierre Bonnassie) have identified as occurring in the early eleventh century and associated with the rise of local lordship and the imposition of servitude upon the peasantry. In line with other more recent anglophone scholarship, Fouracre attends to longer term continuities, regional variations, and perhaps most importantly variations in the nature of the surviving documentation and what it can tell us. Thus, an unexpected byproduct of the book is a very useful sketch of, and intermittently skeptical commentary upon, the large-scale shifts in socioeconomic structure found across the European Middle Ages.

However, I have also mentioned the "frustration" evoked by this book. Regarding the central topic of church lights...