The Western Church in the Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 271 Modernists and those with a general interest in Western European culture will all find this book of immense value. Kuller Shuger's personable style is engaging and her prose manages to be both clear and highly evocative, offering insights that are probing and genuinely innovative. Based on extensive primary research, her arguments are solid and compelling and, as a model of academic research, The Renaissance Bible is itself a superb contribution to the project of scholarly investigation of the Early Modern period. Susan Penberthy Department of English University of Western Australia Thomson, John A. E, The Western Church in the Middle Ages, London, Arnold, 1998; board; pp. viii, 293; R.R.P. US$40.00. Those who dare to undertake a survey of the medieval Church in Western Europe face a crucial question: h o w to define the scope of their potentially vast subject. The older approach was an institutional one, focussing on the official structures and religious organisations which constituted the Church in a formal sense. More recently, historians have preferred to take a broader perspective, embracing more general questions of Christian beliefs and theology. The last great representative of the institutional approach was Richard Southern's Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970), though he feels a need to apologise for setting such limits to make his task manageable. The broader approach is represented by Bernard Hamilton's Religion in the Medieval West (1986) and Joseph Lynch's The Medieval Church (1992), and n o w by John Thomson's n e w survey. Thomson's textbook—although this term does not appear anywhere in it—is organised into three broad chronological periods, each with its own theme: convergence (450-1050), unification (1050-1270), and divergence (1270-1515). Each period is given more or less equal space. Within each section, the chapters are a mixture of the chronological (especially in the third part) and the thematic, covering such topics as beliefs, the Papacy, theology, and monasticism. It's interesting to compare this arrangement with Lynch, whose coverage is slightly shorter (ending 272 Reviews in the mid-15th century) and focuses heavily on the llth-13th centuries (about 6 0 % ofhis book). Lynch's chapters tend to be mainly chronological accounts, except within this central period. Southern, on the other hand, covers a shorter span of time (700-1550) and gets the chronological account out of the w a y early, preferring to structure the main body of his work around the major institutions (papacy, bishops, religious orders) over the whole period. Thomson also includes various ancillary materials for the student. There is a lengthy bibliography, covering primary sources (mainly in English translation) as well as secondary writings (again mainly English). Presented as two unannotated lists, it is less effective for the student than Lynch's chapter-by-chapter annotated guide to relevant reading. There are also some surprising omissions from Thomson's lists: Giles Constable does not appear and neither does Jean Leclercq's The Love of Learning and the Desirefor God, while Peter Abelard is missing from the primary sources. A s well as the bibliography, Thomson provides a chronological list of events, a list of popes, and a glossary. Lynch also includes a glossary, but the two glossaries—surprisingly enough—have only about 1 0 % of their words in common! Missing from Thomson's book are any maps, though both Lynch and Southern have a useful, i f small, collection of black and white maps. Thomson's survey covers a great deal of ground effectively and competently. Probably the only significant omission, acknowledged by Thomson in his preface, is any coverage of w o m e n in the medieval Church. While he justifies this in terms of the need to be selective in his coverage, it undoubtedly weakens his book as a general survey. Even Southern managed to find room for ten pages on nuns! Thomson's account is firmly grounded in recent scholarship as well as in the primary sources, though he tends to quote medieval authors in very small snippets only. Southern is noticeably more generous in his use of quotations. Finally, Thomson generally writes clearly and...