In Polluting the Sacred, Daniel E. Thiery examines the relationship between violence and religion in late medieval England, employing a modified version of Norbert Elias's “civilizing process.” Despite much criticism by medievalists of Elias's characterization of medieval people as uninhibitedly emotional and prone to easy, unthinking violence (in Freudian terms, medievals were all id, no superego), Thiery argues that there was something to Elias's theory—medieval people used and understood violence differently from moderns. But unlike Elias, who rejected religious values as having any influence on social behavior, as religion simply replicated the norms and values of the society in which it flourished, Thiery argues that it was medieval Christianity—not humanism and the new monarchies of the sixteenth century, as Elias would have it—that inculcated ideals of restraint and introspection. If the broad argument that late medieval Christianity was characterized as much by focus on the “internal forum”—the conscience—as by ritual action and propitiation is by no means novel, how ordinary medieval Christian laypeople understood the relationship between religion, restraint, and violence has been little addressed, especially as regards quotidian uses of violence as opposed to the headline news items of medieval conflict such as the Crusades. Thiery's study, focused on late medieval England, investigates this issue through the theory presented in prescriptive sources (including liturgy, handbooks for priests, and sermons), and evidence of praxis seen through legal records, letters, and chronicles. He argues that the roots of modern Western culture's abhorrence and pathologization of violence lies in this later medieval identification of restraint, and avoidance of violence, with Christian charity. The rejection of violence began, he contends, in the church itself, with the setting apart of sacred space and ritual from the sacrilege of violence; in turn, the sacredness of peace and charity would lead to the questioning of the appropriateness of violence and aggression in other contexts, ultimately leading to the association of violence with criminality and, by the twentieth century, with pathology.

Thiery's argument has much merit: the development of civility in Western societies from the medieval period owes more to Christian ideology than has often been recognized. Late medieval English legal records often said that a good subject lived “in God's peace and the king’s”; Christianity was fully integral to the development of royal and civic ideas in England regarding order, lawfulness, and good governance. Thiery's argument in Polluting the Sacred, however, is overstated in some respects, particularly in his claim that the roots of Western civil society and its rejection of unrestrained violence can be found uniquely in late medieval clerical Christianity's focus on charity and respect for the clergy and the space of the church. This argument demands first an exclusive focus on a particular kind of late medieval Christianity, and second an exclusive focus on violence as sin and sacrilege rather than as crime and breach of social order. Thiery's late medieval Christianity is very much the clerical version, where the central focus is on the priesthood and in particular on the eucharist, which was one, but not the only, influential strand in late medieval Christianity. It might have been interesting, for instance, to consider how lay devotional works and commonplace books presented aggressiveness, in light of the recent scholarship highlighting lay spirituality in the late Middle Ages. For Thiery, however, late medieval English Christianity was thoroughly sacerdotal, and the laity learned what the clergy preached. Thiery in fact goes further than most late medieval ecclesiastics would in his understanding of the status of the priesthood: throughout the book, he calls medieval priests, by virtue of their clergy, “sacred” and “holy,” even at one point saying a priest was “a holy individual who, just like the host that he held, was untouchable by human hands” (168). Priests had access to the sacred in their ability to confect the eucharist—but that is not the same as saying that a priest, by virtue of his ordination, was axiomatically considered “holy.” Many late medieval ecclesiastics knew better than to raise expectations regarding priests that high, when they were doomed to be disappointed, priests being fallible humans as any number of Thiery's examples show. Yet Thiery's argument is premised not only on the “sacredness” of the priest's person but on the laity's virtually universal acceptance of that sacredness, so that “to violate the solemnity of the mass and to desecrate the sacred being of the priest was beyond the imagination” (170) of laypeople. Laypeople could, however, imagine attacking priests, and they could even sometimes do it, as Thiery himself describes in some detail (e.g., 128–29, 133–34, 143). No doubt attacking a priest was more sinful and sacrilegious than attacking someone else, but clearly they were hardly the “untouchables” that Thiery terms them. The other side of Thiery's argument is that the late medieval laity lived in—just as Elias had it, and as Peter Heath, quoted by Thiery, says—“a world of ‘unrestrained passion and unseemly violence’” (154). In Thiery's formulation, any restraint from violence shown by late medieval English laypeople owed its origins to the message of a particular form of late medieval clerical Catholicism, focused on eucharistic piety; without that message, there would have been no restraint at all. So it seems “remarkable” to Thiery, for instance, that someone would attempt to stop an assault “even outside of a sacred setting” (166). Seeing late medieval violence solely as impiety, and never as crime punishable by hanging, however, renders inexplicable (and here, unexplored) attempts to curb violence by any other authorities—royal, civic, familial. Assault and murder were not just sins, they were also—and had by the period of Thiery's focus long been—crimes, ruptures to the social order, breaches of the king's peace punishable in the king's courts. If legal historians would do well to think harder about how thoroughly imbricated Christian values had become in concepts of order by the later Middle Ages, so also does Thiery need to consider violence as crime. Altogether, readers may agree with Thiery that the ideology of Christian charity and peace played a role in attitudes toward violence, but not everyone will accept Thiery's argument that it played the only role.