This collection of essays brings together literary scholars and historians to reflect on the relationship between secular and sacred in the Middle Ages and, much more briefly, the early modern period. An engaging inquiry, it demonstrates the wide range of approaches to religious belief and practice across these two disciplines.

Lawrence Besserman's introduction lays the groundwork for the essays, providing both a discussion of the terms (sacred and secular) and a history of these ideas throughout the medieval period. The essays are then divided into two parts, literature and history, although a number of the essays cross disciplinary boundaries. All of the essays address what one could loosely call religious matters—indulgences, the Eucharist, saints’ lives, theological writings, church history. For most of the writers, what is sacred or what is secular is presumed rather than explained. Only two authors, both in the history section, directly address the terms sacred and secular. First, Esther Cohen draws on anthropological studies concerning pain and purity to offer a history of sacred pain (martyrdom) and its secularization. By examining words referring to pain, she argues that the language of martyrdom influenced discussions of judicial torture. Second, in a compelling essay, Rita Copeland investigates the writings of a group of heretics, the English Lollards, to ask when sacred discourses show self-consciousness about their use of the secular, understood here as rhetoric. She answers this question by comparing Hegel's and the Wycliffites’ discussions of sophistry. As much as sacred discourses (such as that of the Wycliffites) separate themselves from rhetoric and the secular, they are dependent on them.

For the authors in the literature section, the focus is mainly on the interplay between a secular literary text and religious language. The essays are organized chronologically, with an essay by Cyril Aslanov comparing the lives of the troubadours (their vidas) to Jacobus Voragine's Legenda Aurea beginning the collection. The four remaining essays all address English literature (the title's focus on Europe is, perhaps, somewhat misleading). Thomas G. Duncan surveys representations of Christ from “The Dream of the Rood” through the fifteenth century, in which a heroic Christ gives way to a Christ expressed more in human (therefore, secular) terms. This discussion will be familiar to anyone who has read Caroline Walker Bynum's work. Alan J. Fletcher examines the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, arguing for the importance of metonymy in understanding the poem's relationship to biblical hermeneutics. It isn’t entirely clear to this reader to what extent metonymy provides a different purchase on this relationship than symbolism or allegory. Alistair Minnis also takes up Middle English poetry, setting Chaucer's Pardoner against the theology of pardons. This immensely informative essay explores the anxiety of medieval theologians over whether in fact pardons confuse earthly and heavenly treasure. Minnis then turns to an early fifteenth-century defense of indulgences associated with Canterbury and, finally, Chaucer's Pardoner, arguing for Chaucer's belief in the value of indulgences. Finally, Murray Roston's essay on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice concludes the literary section. Roston argues that the play is “in the fullest sense a reenactment of the Crucifixion story” (87) in which Shakespeare splits the merchant into two (the evil Shylock and the good Antonio) in order to validate trade.

The authors in the history section range more widely in both period and location, from the Gregorian Reform to Martin Luther, but the focus is largely on the official documents of the church, with the exception of Copeland's essay (discussed above). Lior Barshack offers an anthropological reading of the Gregorian Reform: the progression from communitas (a term he borrows from Victor Turner) to a corporate structure with laws, bureaucracy, and the division of laity and clergy. The essay is less interested in a historical account than in a theorization, and this reader wondered, therefore, to what extent the term communitas has an explanatory power for pre-Gregorian religious belief and practice. A more focused reading of church history can be found in Robert Stein's insightful essay. Here he reads the eleventh-century history The Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai not only as a chronicle of events (such as the rebuilding of the cathedral) but also as a polemical attempt to authorize the bishop's political power. He locates this polemic in the chronicle's use of exempla and stories of miracles, all of which show the bishop both challenged by and victorious over secular adversaries. Stein's analysis of exempla would form an interesting companion to Larry Scanlon's Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 1994). Finally, Miri Rubin's essay ends the collection. She reads the medieval mass, as defined by Innocent III in the thirteenth century, through the critique offered by Martin Luther. She focuses on the elevation of the Host and the way in which discussions of this ritual reveal a “polemical content” (176)—the desire to distance Christianity from Judaism.

The advantage to organizing this collection around secular and sacred (instead of, say, religion and politics) is that these terms encourage readers to see religious language as a conscious and often polemical choice with a particular history, a point made most clearly in the excellent essays by Copeland, Minnis, and Stein, as well as in Besserman's introduction. The disadvantage is the diffuse focus; the essays do not “talk” to each other or to the methodology laid out in the introduction. Moreover, the writers seem to be writing for different kinds of audiences. Some essays assume a great deal of knowledge about a particular text (Fletcher on Pearl), and others seem to be relatively introductory (Duncan on Middle English lyrics). This collection is perhaps most useful for readers interested in dipping into their specific specialties.