An intriguing title preludes an intriguing book. Certainly, the places, patrons and purposes of the numerous chapels existing adjacent to the medieval parish deserve detailed attention from scholarship. In supporting Sarah Thomas's commitment to an otherwise overlooked topic and publishing this relatively slight volume (two hundred pages) the Boydell Press has again made a significant contribution to medieval studies. Over the past twenty years, interdisciplinary parish studies have become a mainstay of medieval humanities research in the UK and a well-researched volume concerned with a related but distinct topic is very welcome. Its own assertion as “the first major comparative study” of its topic certainly validates its publication. However, given the relatively scant body of literature attending to non-parochial, community/vernacular places of worship in comparison to parish churches, one wonders at the idea of exploring the tentative relationship between architectural circumstances and human engagements in Britain and Norway. A similar study focused on religious territories within the British Isles, Norway, or another European country, where the parish was the Church's local power base, might have cohered more readily. The introduction, which helpfully sets out the research agenda unpinning the volume's main contents, also summarizes the book's three themes: “the universality of the high and later medieval Church, the extent of Scandinavian influence in the British Isles, and the impact of population decline on religious landscapes.” Three interesting topics, but the text that follows does much more than address these rather highfalutin conceptual agendas. It would have been a pleasure to hear celebrated the joy of historical myopia and the invaluable insights gained through spotlighting the idiosyncrasies of specific places and peoples.
The book's study areas are three diocese and two archdeaconries distributed across three countries. The dioceses are Sodor (Norway, later Scotland), Galloway (Scotland), and Bergen (Norway); the archdeaconries are East Riding (York diocese, England) and Cornwall (Exeter diocese, England). The apparent outlier, Cornwall, is supposedly justified first because it was in Canterbury diocese (to contrast with the East Riding being in York diocese), and second because it permitted exploration of whether Christianization of the Norse and Danes in the ninth and tenth centuries left its mark on chapel networks—as part of a diocese with “virtually no Scandinavian settlement” (that is Exeter), Cornwall is employed to act as a control. However, the geographical segregation of Cornwall from the other study areas sits uncomfortably, and its choice seems rather arbitrary. The implied empirical methodology (of experimental testing and observation) is inherently restrictive when applied to the intricacies and inconsistencies of human behavior in all its glorious variety. Similar quasi-scientific methods permeate the whole book. The text is data-rich, displaying the results of dedicated primary and secondary interdisciplinary research. The referencing is exemplary and as a source for locating literature on related topics the book will serve it readers well. The density of data does, however, tend to conceal the clarity of the book's deductions, and the short concluding section at the close of each chapter does little more than summarize the preceding pages. The author's own interpretative insights would have been most welcome.
The author, Sarah Thomas, must be congratulated for the rigor of her scholarship, and the book stands as fitting testament to her skill in working with medieval and early modern primary evidence, and antiquarian and modern sources across a broad range of disciplines. Thomas gained her PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her postdoctoral project at the University of Sterling examines two connections between medieval bishops in Britain and Scandinavia. The parish and the chapel in Medieval Britain and Norway is, in some part, a combination of these two periods of research activity. Yet for all the hard-won findings and historical anecdotes, the narrative remains rather insubstantial. The publisher's own appraisal is accurate in its hesitancy, describing the book as an “Interdisciplinary study of chapels [that] provides a more complex and fuller picture of engagement with the Church and Christianity in the Middle Ages.” Perhaps the author's intimacy with the material she studies has caused her to lose sight of its delicate detail. For high-level humanities scholarship to have societal impact beyond the academy, writers need to be considerate to their readers when offering the findings of their academic expertise and prowess. Narratives which effectively distil the primary importance of the “knowledge-burden” generated through painstaking research tend to benefit from a slightly more lyrical tone than is offered in the pages of this book. Happily, Sarah Thomas has also written several detailed articles drawing on related research activities and, when treated as companions to this book, these offer welcome monographic studies of the complicated issues which (owing to limitations in terms of space and structure) are not fully explored in the book.
