Introduction
In the first quarter of the fifteenth century, an otherwise unremarkable Englishwoman undertook a remarkable series of journeys, the most remarkable of which took her from her home town of Bishopʾs (now Kingʾs) Lynn in Norfolk through Germany to Venice, and thence by sea to the Holy Land and a tour of the sites associated with the life and death of Christ. She returned via Italy, spending time at Rome and Assisi. All in all, it took her just under two years to complete this epic series of travels, probably from autumn 1413 to late spring in 1415. Other journeys and voyages took her across England, over the Bay of Biscay to Compostela, and by sea to Danzig and thence by land back through Germany to England. These heroic pilgrimages – for such they were – were written up with an often frustrating lack of detail in the text now known as The Book of Margery Kempe, essentially a ghostwritten autobiography that has provided the foundation for a veritable industry of modern medieval scholarship.1
Margery Kempe travelled throughout – and beyond – the area that we might call ‘Catholic Europe’, the territories that shared a common form of Christianity under the headship of the pope, who, wherever he actually resided, was in title also Bishop of Rome. In theory, but not in all practical detail, the religion was the same across the whole area, so that a Catholic could comfortably be a practising Catholic wherever he or she was. Margery Kempe’s book gives no indication that this was not essentially the case. She did feel some unease when unable to find a priest to hear her confession in Rome (an act that required both sides to be able to speak the same language, rather than rely on the common cues of spoken text and observed performance in the Latin Mass), but apart from that, she seems to have faced no difficulties (or none that she records) in dealing with the changes in ecclesiastical and liturgical environments. Nor, as far as we can tell, did many of the others who moved across Catholic Europe between 1050 and 1500, sharing in a religious culture that, despite its many localised features, was nevertheless sufficiently similar to be shared when it mattered, and insufficiently different to create difficulties worth commenting on.
That shared religious culture provides an immediate point of entry to this volume, and immediately limits its ambitions. Although a History of Medieval Christianity, it cannot aspire to deal with all aspects of Christianity; all medieval Christianities. Even if pre-Reformation Christianity was primarily a European phenomenon (although not wholly so – there were also the assorted Christianities of the Middle East, the Copts of North Africa and Ethiopia, the Thomasists in India), even within Europe there had developed two strong and divergent traditions, those of Catholicism in the west and Orthodoxy in the east. Revolving around their rival centres of Rome and Constantinople, these two slowly developed their distinct traditions and practices, and their increasingly incompatible doctrinal stances and interpretations. By 1054, the differences between Rome and Constantinople had become irreconcilable, and in that year became entrenched in a formal breach that has never been formally healed. From that point, rivalry and mutual hostility reinforced the division, creating something like a religious Iron Curtain across Europe.2
The multiplicity of Christianities, and especially the division within Europe, creates an initial problem of coverage and ambition for a volume such as this. Given the structure of the Routledge Histories as volumes of essays, it would be unrealistic to try to cover all types of Christianity within a single collection. Practicality and the need for overall coherence impose limitations, here reflected in the decision to limit attention solely to Catholic Christianity, and so essentially to the version that extended over Western, Northern and Central Europe, reaching out for a while to the Eastern Mediterranean and crusader states of the Middle East.
A second problem of coverage and ambition arises with regard to periodisation. For purists, a full history of ʿmedievalʾ Christianity should probably start several centuries before this volume does. Exactly where the fuller history should start is unclear, and not something to debate here, but the middle of the eleventh century is clearly well into the ʿfullʾ medieval period. Again, practicality and coherence come into play. A more extensive chronological coverage would require a larger and more complex volume, with a wider geographical coverage and attention to a much wider range of Christianities. It would be impossible to do justice to that range within a single volume of essays. Here, chronological and geographical restrictions work together. The middle of the eleventh century provides a convenient and meaningful point of departure in terms both of the consolidation of Catholicism as the dominant religious tradition of Western Europe and of the customary periodisation of Western European history. Here, the former is more important than the latter, but the coincidence is advantageous.
At the other end of the later Middle Ages, the Reformation guillotines through the continuity of non-Orthodox European Christianity. While it provides part of the frame around the medieval Church, for present purposes the Reformation has to be extraneous to the volume, and excluded from it: to bring it in would again bring distortion. The terminal date is therefore set around 1500, with a fuzziness that is deliberate, to allow some acknowledgement of the first years of the sixteenth century while still ensuring that the focus remains firmly on the pre-Reformation Church.
Within the imposed parameters of time and space, Catholic Christianity evolved considerably, and to cover even these 450-500 years effectively is a challenge. Since its inception, the aim of the volume has been to offer a broad overview based primarily on themes rather than narrative. That again imposes limitations and restrictions on coverage. The condensation required to deal with the themes also means that, realistically, the essays, and the collection as a whole, cannot aspire to cover their subjects in great depth; the basic aim and function is to provide accessible and useful initial guides to the material, indicating the current state of scholarship and debate on the topics that are addressed.
The shape of the discussion is necessarily dictated by the understanding of what has to be addressed. A history of Catholicism as an organised Church would focus primarily on institutional developments; its history as an organised religion and a body of worshippers would concentrate on more specifically spiritual, devotional and theological evolutions. Neither would match the understanding applied here, although both contribute to it.
To interpret medieval Catholicism solely through institutional or devotional developments, to treat it through a lens distorted by a current terminology that sees ʿorganised religionʾ as something slightly quirky and divorced from the real world – if not quite as a total irrelevance to be dismissed almost pejoratively as ʿorganised religionʾ – would be to start on the wrong foot. Institutional and devotional developments certainly were important, and are necessary components of the overall history, but it is impossible to read through the mountain of relevant texts generated over these centuries, or examine the surviving artefacts, without appreciating that the totality was much more. In its theological analyses, in its law and legal system, in its commentaries on texts such as the Ten Commandments, in penitential guidebooks for priests and instructional manuals for laity, and in its analyses of political and economic morality and propriety, the modern boundaries that segregate ʿreligionʾ from ʿlifeʾ simply dissolve. The ʿreligionʾ was, of course, there, in the bewildering and complex amalgam of devotional practices, spirituality, artefacts and worship; but at its most expansive, this Christianity embraced life, the universe, and everything, seeking to provide the definitive answer to the ultimate question: ʿWhat must I do to be saved?ʾ Offering guidance for living and self-improvement to insecure humans tracing an uncertain path through a dangerous world – a world of sin and temptation, where the frailty of human will and willpower was at constant risk of surrendering to the devil as a real and living presence – Catholicism impacted on virtually every aspect of human existence, interpreted through its specific moral and spiritual lens. Its prescriptions and proscriptions sought to shape human society as a whole throughout the generations, and individual lives from cradle to grave, seeking to prepare people (in theory and ambition all people, worldwide) for an eternal afterlife that was, in reality, much more important than this merely terrestrial existence. That this unending struggle was often a losing battle, that those who should have been warriors for Christ were not always fit for the fight, and that many souls were lost, is beyond the point (although part of the history). Nevertheless, the nature of the struggle means that its history has to encompass the warriors, the war, the tactics, the enemy and the battlefield. It has to resist artificially imposed limitations, and take the aspirations of the religion seriously, to chart it as an all-pervasive factor in medieval lives – welcomed and resisted, embraced and rejected, always challenged and challenging, evolving and adapting.
To attempt to cram all that such an encyclopaedic approach requires within the confines of a single volume of essays is clearly unrealistic; in fact impossible. There were always going to be gaps, although it is only in the final stages of compilation that they can all become visible (at least, to the compiler). To the readers, some will be glaring, others less noticeable, but realism has had to limit ambition and aspiration. Selectivity does, though, keep things manageable. The volume will do its job if it succeeds in validating the initial claims about the significance of medieval Christianity in its contemporary world, and provides a satisfactory and worthwhile initial survey – or collection of miniature surveys – as a starting point for wider and deeper investigation.
With that aim in mind, and preceded by a preliminary consideration of the state of Western Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century, the essays are organised into a series of small groups, each of which addresses an embracing theme. These groups are arranged in what is hoped will prove a progressive succession. Opening up from a first group that concentrates on the organised Church, the segments move through consideration of mindsets and more narrowly religious issues and practice to examine the broader social impact and influence. Each section has its own miniature introduction, to establish its internal coherence and try to paper over some (but by no means all) of the inevitable cracks. Of course, the groups cannot function as absolutely self-contained units: some elements recur in different parts of the volume, although dealt with in their different contexts in ways that mean that recurrence is not repetition. Other themes that lack specific treatment will emerge from consolidation of discussion scattered through the volume. While the Reformation itself is deliberately and determinedly not a factor in these discussions, it nevertheless casts its shadow backwards on to the late medieval Church. To round things off, the ‘Afterword’ therefore offers an assessment of the overall situation around 1500, using that date to mark the culmination of the preceding centuries rather than treating it as part of the prelude to an upheaval that, looked at with foresight rather than hindsight, might as legitimately be called a ʿDeformationʾ as a ʿReformationʾ.
A final word is needed on the format of the volume. The essays are all works of scholarship, but the guiding principle of accessibility for readers means that referencing is deliberately not intensive. The precise level of referencing deemed appropriate has been left to the contributors, the basic guidance being to keep it simple, but not inadequate.
The original mental plan for the volume included an array of maps, but in the end there are none. Once serious work began, it became clear that for maps to work, what would be needed was not a few scattered token snapshots, but an atlas. Because of the geographical extent of this late-medieval Catholic Europe – at its broadest from Greenland to Palestine; from Lapland to southern Spain and Cyprus – the scale needed to fit the pages would render any map meaningless. The constant ebb and flow of boundaries and distributions, whether of Catholic Europe as a whole, or of dioceses, pilgrimage sites, monastic houses (by their various orders), or the myriad other possible elements that could be mapped, would also pose problems, even at the most basic levels: what date(s) should be selected as representative and meaningful? Maps certainly illustrate and explicate, but can also deceive by conveying a false impression: in the end, the perceived dangers of deception and misrepresentation have tipped the balance.
Notes
- B. A. Windeatt (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe, London: Penguin, 1985. See also A. Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002. Find
- Brief notices of other Christianities in D. T. Irvin and S. W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Volume I: Earliest History to 1453, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001, Parts V and VI. For the separation of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, H. Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, from Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Find