In Reimagining Christendom, Joel Anderson uses letters, bulls, sagas, and vitas from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland to chart the responses of the ecclesiastical elite at the periphery of Christendom to processes of doctrinal, liturgical, and legal centralization and homogenization emanating from Rome. Medieval Icelandic Christian practices differed markedly from their Roman counterparts: where celibacy, for instance, was strictly enforced among Roman clergy, Icelandic deacons, priests, and even bishops were often married and had families. Anderson argues that, rather than openly defying central Church authority on such matters, Icelandic clerics produced, interpreted, and sometimes ignored written documents in ways that allowed them both to continue their established practices and to justify these as consonant with directives from Rome. Written documents—sometimes authentic, sometimes forged, sometimes blank and presealed (carte blanche), sometimes present physically, and sometimes only referred to in narrative accounts—became for Icelandic bishops, suffragan first to the archbishop of Lund and later to that of Niðaróss (Trondheim), strategic tools for maintaining power for themselves, their families, their institutions, or their friends in a fiercely local and often combative Icelandic society. Surveying a variety of clerically produced texts known collectively as biskupa sögur (“bishops’ sagas”), Anderson writes, “Embedded within these stories was a method for imagining Christendom, one in which the ongoing centralization of authority within the church and the concentration of jurisdiction in Rome had the paradoxical effect of bolstering local forms of authority and sanctioning deviation from universal rules” (75). This paradoxical effect could arise only because, as Anderson demonstrates, the papacy and curia of the time were primarily a “rescript government,” responding to myriad requests from far-flung monarchs, bishops, abbots, merchants, and others, and granting exceptions to its canons and decrees in inconsistent and often unverifiable fashion—a tendency that convinced Christians in distant places that Rome made all the rules but also granted all the exceptions.

Anderson constructs his argument primarily using close readings of a number of sagas and chronicles, including Árna saga, Guðmundar saga, Hungrvaka, Jóns saga, Lárentius saga, Páls saga, Sverris saga, Þorláks saga, and assorted þættir. He often examines sagas in multiple redactions in order to delineate their evolving strategic portrayal of the production and receipt of documents. He also draws extensively on Latin correspondence, decretals, and directives produced to provide context and often conflicting evidence for Icelandic claims. Anderson shows how clerical authors explained away significant defects of Icelandic bishops, saints, and policies through assertions of consultations with Rome. Bishop of Hólar Jón Ǫgmundarson (d. 1121) may have been married twice, but his consecration as bishop had been preceded, biographers claimed, by a pious visit to Rome and a papal grant of dispensation. Bishop of Skálholt Þorlákr Þórhallsson (d. 1193) may have been declared a saint in Iceland without prior recourse to the increasingly stringent Roman process of canonization, but representatives from Rome, biographers contended, assented to his sanctity once they witnessed his miracles. Bishop Guðmundr Arason (r. 1203–1237) may have “practiced a sometimes thoroughly unorthodox religiosity that featured hasty ordinations, an unseemly retinue, and the widespread consecration of holy wells and springs” (79), but his biographers a century later could assert that his practices aligned perfectly with Roman canon law. Papal authorities may have mandated the levying of taxes for the crusades, or sent legates to uphold Roman policies, but these had to contend with local elites, frequent forgers, and bishops that found other uses for gathered funds.

A key figure in the study is the ambitious and powerful Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), who aimed to “exercise dominion through documents,” envisioning papal bulls as “distance-demolishing technologies, integrating their recipients into a shared, Romano-centric understanding of the church” (25). Anderson shows how Innocent recognized both the awesome administrative potential as well as the inevitable frailty of governing through documents. The promise of uniformity was countered by the reality of the ease by which forgery or misconstrual could thwart papal intent. While the study's focus is kept honed on Iceland, with occasional discussion of other Nordic clerics in Greenland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, it could be a valuable next step in this examination to draw more comparisons with Rome's dealings with branches of Christianity lying outside of the Latin rite, particularly its interactions with the many Eastern churches and patriarchs whose relations with Rome were so complex and fraught in a period that witnessed the sack of Constantinople (1204). Innocent's rigid insistence that Eastern churches acknowledge Roman supremacy in his Fourth Lateran Council's fourth canon (1215; “one flock, one shepherd”), carried with it the implicit acknowledgment that any re-establishment of unity would necessitate acceptance of the abundance of equally valid traditions, liturgies, and customs that flourished across the continent and that had ancient roots in the history of the faith. Any attempted abridgment of such diversity would thwart the process of reunification. In many ways, the kind of conflict avoidance that Anderson describes for Icelandic prelates probably worked in both directions, with peripheral bishops, or their clerical biographers, downplaying deviance from Rome at the same time that Rome may have wished to look the other way, or at least, had to acknowledge the limitations of even its most draconian punishments. Excommunication proved remarkably ineffective against a powerful monarch like Norway's King Sverrir Sigurðarson or the many bishops who were his allies.

Within historiography, Anderson's study participates in a shift away from analysis of processes of papal consolidation and Roman centralization (associated with classic historians like R. W. Southern and Robert Bartlett) toward one that focuses more on concomitant processes of local episcopal interpretation and the frequent appeals (or favor-mongering) inherent in the Roman church. As Anderson aptly shows, centralization and the continuance of local exceptionalism went hand in hand in Europe's thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, aided by the rise of documents as devices of social and legal control.