Late medieval European (or English) religion is still often imagined as a space of secure Christian hegemony. Several decades of scholarship on Lollard ideas, texts, and practices have complicated this picture for England, but the emphasis on heterodox challenges to a stable orthodoxy leaves in place a monolithic Christianitas at the center of any controversy. A number of recent studies have shown, however, that even in the absence of non-Christians, late medieval English Christianity is shaped by its encounters, often imaginary, with religious others, specifically Jews and Muslims. As Sarah Salih's important new monograph, shows, pagans, though relegated to either a superseded time or a distant space, also occupy late medieval English Christian imaginations in powerful ways. “Paganity,” an imagined pagan culture, enables thinkers and writers to engage in “thought-experiments” that reveal much about Christian ideas and English identities (19–20).

After a reflective introduction that lays out the contours of the book's argument, the chapters of Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England follow a certain chronology. The first, “Origins: Building Cities, Making Idols,” considers how pagan cultures are treated as points of origin, constructing idols at the center of their religious practice and building cities, especially Troy, whose history stands in rich relationship to European and English genealogical self-understandings. Chapter 2, “Encounters: The City Converted, the Fallen Idols,” examines moments at which pagan and Christian come into direct contact with each other, particularly the moment of the Incarnation when the pagan idols are understood to have fallen. Rome, converted from pagan imperial center to the seat of Christianity, is here prominent, explored particularly through hagiography, though another later site of encounter—represented in John Lydgate's Life of St Edmund—provides the ground for a different sort of pagan-Christian (Danish-English) contest. These first chapters analyze how late medieval English writers use paganity to explore history. The third, “The Present: Traces, Recurrences, Survivals,” treats instead how paganity continues to inhabit the present moment, with Christian devotional use of images connected to, but also distinguished from, pagan idolatry. The book's concluding chapter, “Coda: The Future” suggests that the late medieval English dynamics of paganity might teach us, too, about the cultural dynamics of our own revival and use of the past.

As Salih argues, certain crucial topoi recur in the late medieval imagination of paganity. One of these is the city, which—as Troy—occupies the center of thinking about pagan origins and—as Rome—stands at the heart of Christian supersessionism. The contemporary (late medieval) city, too—containing fragmentary pagan artifacts—is marked by a paganity taken up seamlessly into Christian self-understandings even as it uncovers an “epistemic rupture” built into the cityscape itself. That paganity is especially associated with material culture is also true for another pagan topos, the idol, which takes particular prominence in the texts Salih considers. In her formulation, “Idols bring together different ideas about matter—that it is live and that it is dead—and different thoughts about religion—that it is a cultural construct and that it is transcendent truth—and hold them in suspension” (60). Stories of how idols and idol worship originate serve to focus attention on problems of religious devotion that, while seemingly put to rest by the Christian dispensation's emphasis on spirit, return repeatedly to haunt late medieval reflections. What does it mean to worship an idol, a piece of dead matter? Is it simply to misrecognize matter for spirit? Or is it to be actively deceived by an evil spirit? Is it to take an object meant to represent something beyond itself—something truly divine and supernatural—and to misread it in a simply literalizing way? Are pagans, then, just bad readers? And if not—if they do in fact recognize the idol as standing for something beyond its brute materiality—how are they different from Christians who deploy images as an intimate part of their own devotional practice? Here, of course, Salih's argument touches upon the orthodox-Lollard debates over images, and she uses the (mostly orthodox) writings of her authors on idols to show how complex late medieval thinking about the devotional use of images was—with staunch Lollards not necessarily ruling out proper devotional uses of images and with firmly orthodox writers sometimes stating iconoclastic positions that might seem heretical.

One exciting theme that emerges from Salih's investigations is the possibility, performed in a number of texts, of the Christian author's occupying the pagan point of view, imagining (for instance) in Lydgate's Troy Book “what it is like to be a pagan” (38). Sometimes, such imaginations occur in bad faith, only as a way of further validating Christian truth. But occasionally, the pagan viewpoint can emerge as something considered in its own right—as, for instance, a counter to Saint Katherine's iconoclasm, in John Capgrave, where the saint is “silenced, even [if] momentarily, by pagan reasoning” (161); or as when, in Alexander Barclay's St George, a pagan princess's musings are used to imagine religious doubt (125). Such “feeling like pagans” (123) is especially fully realized in the exploration of contemporary paganity in Mandeville's Travels, a text that Salih gives detailed, thoughtful attention. She suggests that “Mandeville's exploration of what it is like to be a pagan tends to the conclusion that it is not that different from being a Christian” (170).

The full richness of Salih's book is difficult to convey in summary form since it depends largely on closely observed readings of complex literary texts, especially hagiography and pseudo-historical works like Lydgate's Troy Book. Imagining the Pagan is also remarkable for Salih's sustained engagement with late medieval images: manuscript illustrations of Lydgate's Troy Book and Life of St Edmund, Mandeville's Travels, and more. That an author so concerned with late medieval ideas about images and idols should show herself so astute in the analysis of material and visual culture is just one of the many strengths and pleasures of Sarah Salih's extraordinary monograph.