The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold

Abstract

Each volume in the Oxford Handbooks series presents an ensemble of specialist essays on different facets of the named subject-area, an area chosen from humanities or social sciences. The aim is to provide scholars and graduate students with state-of-the art scholarship on the topics covered, with new perspectives and clues for possible future research. Every essay has endnotes, flagging English translations of sources, where available, and adds Recommendations for Further Reading. History has already been well-served by the series, and Medieval Christianity now joins its beneficiaries. An introduction, by John H. Arnold, the editor, is followed by thirty chapters. Many of their authors are already household names, and all hold, or have held, academic positions in North America, Britain or continental Europe. To find the new perspectives, in a field well-marked out by old ones, the material is marshalled into deliberately non-traditional Parts, entitled ‘Methods’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Practices’, ‘Ideas’, ‘Identities’ and ‘Power’. Each has its own cluster of essays. Like an officer leading his troops, the editor leads off the ‘Methods’ section with a masterly—if inevitably a little breathless towards the end—resumé of historiography on the subject. This is followed by anthropology, with another well-read resumé (Simon Yarrow) and art history (Beth Williamson), here neatly zipped into a study of a micromosaic in Rome. The final ‘method’ (R.I. Moore) is comparison across the world, for instance China. ‘Spaces’, in Part II, again include big and small. We learn how, before maps, the Muslim–Christian frontier in Spain was marked by castles, serving like dotted-line boundaries (Amy Remensnyder). On the opposite Christian frontier, Sverre Bagge explains how the Christian conversion of the northern peoples entailed simultaneously a political conversion, into kingdoms. Smaller, but still extensive, were the spaces affected, beyond their walls, by monasteries and cities (Wendy Davies); then, downscaling still further, we scrutinise religious behaviour in towns (Nicholas Terpstra), in parishes and in private houses (Katherine French), with special attention, in both, to gender differences.