After a brief explanatory introduction, this volume offers some thirty-one essays on the social and intellectual history of medieval Christianity which are grouped together under seven broad subject headings, and in some cases sorted into rough time periods: ‘Institutions and change, 1100–1200’; ‘Forging a Christian world, 1200–1300’; ‘The erection of boundaries’; ‘Shapes of a Christian world’; ‘Christian life in movement’; ‘The challenges to a Christian society’; and, finally, ‘Reform and renewal’.
Most essays are judicious summaries of major topics, while some also identify the principal questions besetting scholars. Footnotes send the reader to detailed studies. The more interesting pieces are mainly those that are more narrowly focussed and lead the reader into unfamiliar territory. Some experts in their field have gamely covered large topics in too short a space. Social history receives better treatment than intellectual history. Thus, the history of religious orders, especially that of their Observant reforms and their relationship to the Devotio moderna, is especially well served, as is the place of preaching in its political context and in relationship to biblical exegesis.
There is a welcome interest in ‘semi-religious’ life, and there is also the attention we now expect for those whom medieval Christians treated in different ways as outsiders: heretics, Jews, and Muslims. On the other hand, this is not the book to induct someone into medieval theology, and you will find little here to help in understanding the work of Bonaventure, Aquinas, or Occam. It is perhaps too easy to fault such a volume for its omissions but there are some surprising gaps in the institutional and cultural history: the Avignon papacy; papal schism; the history of conciliarism in relation to such matters; and the rise of Christian Humanism. These are among the topics glanced at in the context of other subjects but which deserved greater space.
Occasionally, an English focus is detectable: Wyclif and Lollardy are the subject of a separate study, whereas Hus appears only within other contexts. More generally, and perhaps inescapably, we hear most about Italy; we hear least, and too little, about Ireland, Scandinavia, Poland, Central Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula. More explicit reflection on what constituted Western European Christianity would have been helpful in this regard.
Very rarely, the details themselves look wrong: in an otherwise admirable essay on ‘Sacramental life’, Miri Rubin translates Hugh of St Victor's ‘sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex simili repraesentans, et ex institutione significans, et ex sanctificatione continens aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.’ This she renders as: ‘A sacrament is a physical or material element, which represents externally according to the senses by similarity, and which signifies by the fact of its institution, and as to the sacred, contains a certain invisible and spiritual grace’ (p. 222). Should we not take ‘foris sensibiliter propositum’ with the noun rather than limit its scope to the first present participle? And should ‘ex sanctificatione’ not refer to the divine act of consecration? Nonetheless, this is a valuable reference work for students and scholars.
