Excommunication is a topic indelibly associated with the Middle Ages but often glossed over or misunderstood. Some historians mention it in passing without much explanation, and one occasionally detects traces of the attitude that excommunication is symptomatic of pre-Reformation ecclesiastical decline: ineffectual and faintly ridiculous. Later twentieth-century historians of canon law such as Richard Helmholz, Elisabeth Vodola, and Donald Logan took it more seriously, but their work tended to be read only by specialists. Felicity Hill’s is altogether different. She takes the technical aspects of the subject seriously while placing them in broad social, ecclesiastical, and political contexts. This demonstrates not only the workings and meaning of excommunication for people in thirteenth-century England, but also the capacity of this topic to illuminate that time and place in genuinely original and exciting ways.

Hill is part of a small wave of anglophone scholarship that situates aspects of canon law and medieval church history in their broader contemporary context. One thinks of recent works by John Sabapathy, Sethina Watson, and others. Such socio-legal approaches are much more common in France and to a lesser extent in Italy and Germany, and this book is in dialogue with all these scholarly traditions. Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England is an important book for medieval studies and will stimulate a great deal of discussion. Felicity Hill is to be congratulated on her impressive feat of research, conceptualization, and writing. Gratifyingly, she is conscious both of her originality and the debts she owes to other scholars. This comes across on every page as the argument is presented lucidly and modestly, but also forcefully, leaving the reader in no doubt as to the strength and interest of the book’s conclusions. The book deals with the intentions behind excommunication, how people reacted to it, and the social effect that it had. It is the work of a mature historical mind and deserves to be read by a wide spectrum of students and teachers of medieval history, whatever their interests.

The chapters illuminate the legal and the theological, but also the political, the social, and the subjective meanings of excommunication. In detailed case studies and apparently exhaustive surveys of the available evidence, Hill explores topics of very wide historical and sociological interest: reputation and publicity, shame, communication, identity and selfhood, crime and deterrence, ostracism, and ideas about the afterlife, to mention just a few. Any reader interested in these features of life in the Middle Ages will benefit from reading her book, and scholars from other disciplines who come across it will also find themselves able to engage with the healthy balance of abstraction and context-specific detail.

Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England is divided into three parts and seven chapters. Part one (“Individuals”) first unravels the historiographical prejudice that excommunication was unimportant in people’s lives, weaving together discussion of its legal, medicinal, ritual, and emotional aspects. The key argument here is that excommunication was intended to instill fear. She then takes up the lived experience of contemporaries, examining how they felt about excommunication at what were always momentous points in their lives: in trouble with the law, ostracized by their communities, facing death. Part two (“Communities”) explores further how that experience played out in social terms: to be excommunicated meant a renegotiation of everything one thought one knew about living with neighbors and as part of a wider Christian society. While it was a legal tool, excommunication “sought to harness a powerful social impulse” (105), the instinct to categorize people into “in” and “out” groups. Part three (“Publicity”) gets to the heart of how excommunication “really” worked. Hill demonstrates that, although the legal niceties of the curse are fundamental to our understanding of excommunication, we need to think about how it played in the public sphere if we are to appreciate its importance and operation. This means paying attention—in fascinating detail, including a wonderful extended case study in the sixth chapter—to the ebb and flow of reputation, scandal, fama, and to the unpredictable unfolding of political events at local and national scales. With such an analysis, Hill develops some important ideas about ecclesiastical development of new media of communication.

The reason that historians have not hitherto delved much into the social meaning and experience of excommunication is the challenge presented by the sources. We would dearly love to know how people felt about a neighbor or family member who had been excommunicated, or how the subject themselves experienced it. But the evidence is, for the most part, simply not there. Hill employs rigorous yet imaginative techniques to work with what is there, looking at the central absence of evidence from every conceivable well-documented periphery, to make reasoned conjectures about the social reality. In places I think she could have gone farther, but that is not a criticism, just a preference. Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England is an important book straddling social, religious, institutional, and legal history. It will be of great interest to all readers interested in any of those themes in the Middle Ages, and it will become the essential starting point for anyone examining excommunication from other angles in future.