Belief and unbelief in a period of well over 500 years make a big and testing subject. It was already that for olden-day giants like Neander, Manning, Mauthner, Coulton and Delaruelle, and more recent ones like the Brookes. It daily becomes more so with the discovery of new documents and ways of reading them (like anthropology). But the subject needs addressing, if it is not to be left to facile generalisations by non-specialists. So John Arnold does a service. He has read assiduously. If none of the names just mentioned feature in his bibliography, their place is filled by a big range of post-1975 authorities. He has set out his findings in language free of jargon and baffling words (if not of four-letter ones, favourites in his translations of Latin expletives); and he has marshalled the whole into a thoughtful framework of six chapters: ‘Belief’, ‘Acculturation’ (taking in preaching and the veneration of images), ‘Intercession’ (with saints, and ‘magic’), ‘Community’, ‘Selfhood’ (including gender, ethics and death) and, finally, ‘Dissent’. Each chapter is spiced with real-life cases, some garnered from Arnold's own earlier work on inquisitions, and there are elegant états de question on matters like confession and purgatory. The problem, for any author in so vast and subtle a field, remains judgement. Arnold is well aware of it. We inevitably get a lot of ‘on the one hand and on the other’, as he strives for a fair verdict. But in doing so he rightly or wrongly ties one hand behind his back by making into marginaux those normally made to represent the medieval Church. The name ‘Christ’ appears three times more often in the ‘Dissent’ chapter than in that on ‘Belief’ (so much for the Paris theologians). The term ‘the Church’ is frequently used, for most of the book in the sense of an oppressive monolith, until we learn, late on, that ‘the Church did not simply impose [penitential activities, etc.] on an unwilling populace’. That touches the central question, itself here marginalised: how far the clergy were really a distinct bloc as against being the collective in (as it were) its Sunday best. So there is bias here. It nevertheless has two happy results: that practice, rather than belief, draws Arnold's main focus; and that, in this practice, he finds great variety. This has an important consequence for his eloquent conclusion. Medieval religion, he says, kept ‘a certain fuzziness and room for manoeuvre’, lost after 1500:
the medieval period is usually positioned as the dark and repressive past from which more enlightened souls escaped in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But one could make a case for arguing that in the … world of lived religion, some of that shift was in precisely the other direction.
Historians of all periods will do well to reflect on that.
