From 2012 until 2014 an International Research Network, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, worked on the theme ‘Converting the Isles: The Study of Conversion to Christianity in the Insular World’. Many of its discussions and talks are available as podcasts at http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk. This is the first published volume; a second, Transforming landscapes of belief in the early medieval world and beyond, will follow. The group deliberately widened focus beyond the Germanic, more or less Romanised world, which has dominated traditional historiography, to include the much less studied Celtic areas – not only Ireland and Wales, but also Brittany and Pictish Scotland – and Scandinavia, including Iceland. Material remains provide the bulk of sources for many of these areas, and archaeologists made significant contributions to the project. The result was a network whose approaches were overtly interdisciplinary, overtly attentive to methodology and committed to a broadly comparative approach, including significant contributions from anthropology, here represented by Chris Wickham and Tomas Sundnes Drønen, but also by Joel Robbins on the website. The paucity of early written sources for the Celtic areas was a factor in moving attention away from missions and the political aspects of conversion to longer-term processes of change and continuity, of assimilation and syncretism, where social, cultural and economic questions were to the fore.
In this first volume, four essays by Roy Flechner, Thomas Pickles, Nancy Edwards and Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide tackle the existing historiography, though Scotland will appear in volume ii. Five deal with conversion and its social and economic context and results: Rory Naismith on coinage; Martin Carver on the Picts, with particular attention to excavations at Portmahomack and Rhynie; Gabor Thomas on Kent, with focus on recent work at Lyminge; Wendy Davies and Roy Flechner on the problems of isolating and assessing the effects of conversion in the context of a range of factors operating over a long period; and an especially challenging but persuasive discussion of Iceland by Orri Vésteinsson. Four essays on missions and three on saints and hagiography address more traditional questions about missionary activity: Ian Wood on the scale vis-à-vis aims and strategies of missions; James Palmer on the return of the martyrdom ideal in and through mission; Colman Etchingham reassessing the fraught questions surrounding Patrick and Palladius; and Tomas Drønen on twentieth-century Norwegian missions in the Cameroons. Alan Thacker examines the telling and retelling of the life of St Cuthbert, Barry Lewis discusses the later conversion narratives of Brittonic areas, Siân Grønlie considers the saga-hero thugs of Icelandic hagiography. The written evidence clearly still has much to reveal, as is underlined in three essays on ‘Perceptions of conversion’: Alex Woolf on the meaning of ‘plebs’ in late antique Britain, Thomas Charles-Edwards on Patrick, his audiences and their reception, and Barbara Yorke's subtle discussion of Anglo-Saxon paganism seen through Christian eyes.
National and nationalist historiographies have affected the story of conversion, from Bede onwards. Nativist views of pagan Ireland and its alleged continuities, the Welsh continuity/discontinuity debate, with a historiographical pre-history of anti-Roman (Catholic) agendas, both are here laid to rest. Recent political shifts have made it easier to open up discussion of influences from Germany and Russia on Scandinavian Christianisation. Political movements of the 1960s and ’70s focused attention on ethnicity; study of the reception of Christianity by different groups – especially the Sami – followed. Less and less is seen as simple straightforward evidence of the advance of Christian belief, more and more is social, economic, political change, happening for other reasons. Edwards is alone in suggesting that we scrutinise ourselves, and especially the impact of secularisation and decline of Christian belief and practice on recent historiography.
Celtic areas lack a conversion narrative like Bede's. Perhaps this is liberating; Bede is a ‘blessing and a curse’ (Pickles), his sharp narrative turns potential stumbling blocks (Yorke). The Icelandic conversion narrative is part of Icelanders’ self-identification, not an account of events (Grønlie). Barry Lewis exploits this Celtic gap both to understand the original conversion of Romano-Britons, and the later stages of conversion which saints’ Lives illuminate. This collection hammers yet more nails into the coffin of an ‘age of missionary converter saints’. Nails, too, in any simple narratives of the advance of Christianity premised on changing burial practice. All indicators once taken as Christian can be found before, except for churchyard burial, and even this is no longer seen as unambiguous in Sweden.
This volume underscores the questions that students of conversion face. Why do individuals embark on mission? Why do others accept their message, what do we understand by that acceptance? Are Christianity or Christianities the best way to approach what is presented, and what results? Was paganism defeated, disempowered or demonised, thus growing in potency? Did converters face a world of gods and priests, or of spirits, shamans, sacral landscapes; and does the familiar face of one mask the other in our sources? Indigenous religions are arguably adapted to their societies, Christianity comes in as an outsider. Conversion is the story of that encounter, its dialogues and conflicts. Does Bede, does anyone, give us the measure of the challenge of converting kings whose authority was bound up with earlier religious belief and practice, or the tension for warrior aristocracies between rejection of their life mode when entering religion, and the new authority which resulted. In all these societies, the dead, the ancestors and their afterlife mattered. Whole social and economic orders were implicated in older practices of burial and remembrance. Vésteinsson is especially perceptive on the need to extend cost/benefit analyses of the adoption of Christianity beyond the economic and political, to wider social, and, one should stress, psychological impacts.
No collection is perfect. Gender and women are less prominent here than we might expect in the twenty-first century. Yet Pickles and Nordeide both open questions about women's roles. Vésteinsson considers the impact of Christianity on strongly gendered notions of personhood in Iceland. Grønlie's thuggish conversion saints indicate both the challenge that Christianity potentially posed to existing gender norms, but also its flexibility and malleability. There is scrupulous attention to source-reading throughout, and a welcome recognition that all approaches are still valid: from Wood's empiricist calculations to Charles-Edwards's sensitive reading of Patrick's letters for dialogue with audience and insight into the ‘facts’ of entrenched perceptions. New sources are brought into play: Naismith's essay on coins, at once ideological/symbolic but of necessity acceptable means of exchange and accumulation, Christian yet not ecclesiastical, opens possibilities of assessing wider audiences and their reception of conversion.
With its up-to-date bibliographies and state of the art summaries, this will be an important work of reference. But it also breaks new ground and opens new questions. The full results of this project will only be appreciated when volume ii appears, dealing more with material sources, literacy and learning, as well as bringing out overall conclusions. The success of volume i whets the appetite.
