Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader ed. by John Shinners

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS77 documents, notably sales or alienations of a variety of properties involving husband-and-wife teams.They also include last testaments, judicial documents, privUeges, gifts, declarations, and similar categories. Kings, counts, countesses, and prelates are represented,but the majority ofactors are private citizens from every level of society. Each document is impeccably edited, as an historical rather than phUological edition, though the phUologist wiU find ample and careful material. Each document offers also a Catalan paraphrase of its contents, with aU proper names translated from Latinate forms. Each includes aU marginalia , rubrics, special signs, and other paleographical and diplomatic notes.The whole is handsomely produced. A book-length introduction in Catalan by the canon Josep BauceUs i Reig exhaustively and intricately analyzes the problems of dating, the codicology, paleography , documentary typology, language, and incidental information required as background. Five indexes include a very complete onomastic Usting; another names some two hundred scribes. Considering the small Barcelona of those two centuries (a suffragan see of Narbonne), these people must have constituted a considerable percentage of the total population, both men and women. The resolute researcher can glean extensive information on the geography of the city and the englobing Catalonia in its formative evolution toward independence .Two of the charters echo the sack of Barcelona by al-Mansür in 985,with people carried off "to Córdoba." Others involve pUgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, a Jewish envoy of Charles the Bald, a "doctor infantium," quite a few judges, and even "Beelzebub et successores eius" and "ludas Scarioth" formulaicaUy cited to curse those who might refuse to honor a donor's wishes. The volume and its project merit the category of monumental, and do honor to their director, the long-term canon-archivist Àngel Fàbrega i Grau, and his collaborators (duly acknowledged). It wUl nourish scholarship for generations to come. Robert I. Burns, SJ. University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader. Edited by John Shinners. [Readings in Medieval CiviUzations and Cultures, IL] (Orchard Park, New York: Broadview Press. 1997. Pp. xx, 545. $22.95 paperback.) John Shinners has produced a coUection of translated sources which wiU be of great use to aU who teach the history of Christianity, and more generally of culture,in the high and late Middle Ages.The readings have been weU chosen to Ulustrate the practices and beliefs of Christians outside the clerical and scholarly eUte. By necessity, however, the vast majority of them are stiU taken from works composed by clerics, such as miracle coUections composed by Caesarius of Heisterbach and Johannes Herolt or sermons by Bernardino of Siena and Geert Grote.The coUection is formed with a very broad understanding of"pop- 78BOOK REVIEWS ular reUgion" in mind, echoing the editor's assertion that "by the twelfth century , medieval popular reUgion was, for many purposes, simply medieval reUgion . . . aU Christians, no matter their status, shared essentially the same religious world view and acted on it in simUar ways" (p. xv). The seventy-seven sources are grouped into ten chapters:"Instruction in the Faith," which contrasts creedal formulae and handbook literature with statements by individuals such as PeterWaldes and Joan ofArc;"God,"which includes Christological and eucharistie piety;"Mary," which presents hymns, visions, and miracle stories;"Saints, Relics, and Pilgrimage," which emphasizes the shrines of saints; "Demons and Spirits," which includes much about the afterlife; "Rituals," which focuses more on blessings and charms than on formal liturgies such as the Mass; "Daily Devotions and Practices," which primarily features material from confraternities and guUds, but also includes indulgences; "Enthusiasm," which unites a potpourri oftexts about such diverse phenomena as the building of the cathedral at Chartres and flageUants;"Error,"which treats both heresy and superstition, but not magic;"Death and Judgment," which brings together more material about the afterlife with texts concerning the social and liturgical practice ofdeath. Each chapter and each text is prefaced by a short introduction:the commentary thus provided is brief, but adequate. (There are no explanatory footnotes.) Each chapter also begins with a single image accompanied by a brief commentary.The choice ofthese Ulustrations appears to have been largely governed by limitations in the process of...