The Christian liturgy was, quite literally, the background music of the medieval world. Not only did the liturgy provide a critical site for Christian worship, but it also organized Christian space and time, bound and divided Christian communities, and provided a running commentary on contemporary affairs. Despite its importance, the liturgy has been largely sidelined by medieval historians for much of the twentieth century, receiving interest primarily from musicologists and liturgical specialists. Happily, over the past three decades, historians have increasingly been incorporating the medieval liturgy into their work. Nathan J. Ristuccia's Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation is one such valuable contribution. In this book, Ristuccia examines liturgical rituals as a site and a means for the growth of Christianity in the early medieval West. Engaging the vast historiography surrounding the concept of “Christianization,” Ristuccia rejects models that characterize Christianization as one core system of ideas and practices (Christianity) replacing another (paganism). Such models, he asserts, rely on modern definitions of religion. He describes his own model as “Christianization without religion,” a catchphrase that seeks to privilege medieval definitions of Christianity over contemporary concepts. Ristuccia seeks to “center our entire paradigm for the spread of Christianity around the development of mandatory rituals,” (2) and he explores this paradigm through a case study of the liturgical season of Rogationtide (three days of penitential processions before Ascension).

Ristuccia traces the growth, development, and significance of early medieval Rogationtide across five chapters. Chapter 1 explores the beginnings of Rogation processions in late fifth- and early sixth-century Gaul and their “[quick] spread” across the early medieval West (26). Focusing in particular on Sidonius Apollinaris and Avitus of Vienne's depictions of the institution of Rogation processions under the fifth-century bishop, Mamertus of Vienne, Ristuccia links the earliest processions to the disappearance of western Roman administration and emphasizes the celebrations’ variability of meaning. In Chapter 2, Ristuccia seeks to disprove the modern trope that Rogation days were Christianized adaptations of a pagan Roman festival. His study of the mythologization of Rogation processions in the polemical contexts of the Reformation and Enlightenment is deeply engaging, and for medieval historians, the chapter is a useful reminder of the impact of early modern religious discourse on medieval scholarship. Chapter 3 returns to the early Middle Ages to explain how Rogation rituals sought to establish boundaries of Christian communities in a pre-parish world. To accomplish this, Ristuccia surveys an enormous body of evidence produced across the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon worlds, ranging as early as the 500s and as late as the 1200s to find “common patterns” and “broad tendencies of Rogation praxis” (98).

The book's last two chapters are the strongest of the five and do the most to advance Ristuccia's argument for the centrality of ritual to Christianization. Chapter 4 examines narratives of Rogation processions that produced conflict, examples that Ristuccia describes in Geertzian terms as “ritual failures” (136). Through detailed readings of Gregory of Tours and the eighth-century missionary Boniface, he investigates how Rogation processions excluded certain groups (Jews, pagans, and heretics) from the Christian community and how they provided opportunities for authorities to offer competing interpretations of Christian community. Ristuccia's deepest exploration of Christianization through ritual occurs in chapter 5, where he tackles ritual's intended impact on Christian hearts and minds. Medieval people were keenly aware that rituals “shaped minds by moving Christian bodies,” (179) and Ristuccia examines this intended effect through pastoral instruction on the Lord's Prayer in Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon homilies that accompanied Rogationtide processions. Overall, chapter 5 is an especially thoughtful look at the means of disseminating orthodox Christianity, and scholars of religious reform will find it valuable reading.

Ristuccia's overall argument that liturgical ritual was critical to Christianization is thoroughly convincing. Yet despite the freshness of Ristuccia's focus on the Christian liturgy, his methodology can be quite traditional. At times, chapters 1 and 3 resemble early twentieth-century attempts to recreate early liturgical traditions by blending references from different times and contexts into one totality. Liturgical specialists, musicologists, and historians, however, are increasingly questioning to what extent scholars can create totalizing narratives of the early medieval liturgy and its standardization: one need only look at debates sparked by James McKinnon's The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (University of California Press, 2000) for a case in point. To give due credit, Ristuccia highlights liturgical diversity throughout the monograph and emphasizes that “variability [in Rogationtide] flourished from the first” (38). But by arguing that “Rogationtide” developed as a distinctive rite in southern Gaul in the 400s and early 500s, “spread” from southern Gaul across the medieval West, and displayed “common patterns” across western Europe between 500 and 1200, the author vastly overstates the coherence of an early medieval liturgical practice, particularly for the pre-Carolingian world. For example, to track the spread of Rogationtide, Ristuccia identifies several pre-Carolingian references to penitential processions (rogationes, letaniae) as Rogationtide processions. While some Gallic sources do refer to three days of penitential processions prior to Ascension Sunday, Ristuccia's methodology reads a particular liturgical event into what, in some cases, were simply references to a common early medieval practice (see especially the Iberian evidence [35–36]). Overall, Ristuccia struggles to balance his recognition of the inherent diversity and flexibility of early medieval liturgy with his central argument for the existence of a distinctive ritual of Rogationtide that is broadly identifiable and trackable across early medieval western Europe.

Ristuccia's overly cohesive presentation of the early medieval liturgy, however, does not invalidate his argument for the importance of ritual in early medieval Christianization. Scholars of religious history would do well to heed his warning that models of Christianization are themselves historically informed paradigms and to take up his call to regard practice as a contested site for becoming and being a Christian. Not only will this book be essential for scholars interested in early medieval liturgy, but it will also be a stimulating read for anyone interested in Christian ritual and Christianization.