Book Review: Medieval Christianity
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Medieval Christianity: A New History
by Kevin Madigan
Yale University Press, 2015
Harvard Divinity School professor Kevin Madigan does his crowning scholarly achievement few favors when he repeatedly introduces it to his readers as a textbook. Several times in the opening remarks to his brilliant new synthesis, Medieval Christianity: A New History, he refers to the legion of scholars who've preceded him in the discipline, particularly S. W. Southern, whose name is invoked more often than any other individual who's not (presumably) a saint in Heaven, and whose seminal work, The Making of the Middle Ages, still reads as invigoratingly as it did when it first appeared more than half a century ago.
With becoming but misleading humility, Madigan is prone to describe his book as an incremental, dwarves-on-the-shoulders-of-giants thing, something that might appeal to modern students of Christian history mainly through its increased emphasis on such post-Vatican II concentrations as the role of women in the Church, or the impact Christianity had on the ordinary townsfolk and plowmen of the Middle Ages. But Madigan has succeeded more thoroughly than he's willing to claim; Medieval Christianity isn't just a helpful modern classroom supplement – it's a landmark of popular history in its own right.
Western – especially European and New England – readers unfamiliar with Madigan's topic will have little conception of the incredible extent to which “Medieval Christianity” is synonymous with “the Middle Ages.” For a thousand years, stretching roughly from the “conversion” of Constantine in the fourth century to heyday of Florentine humanism in the 15th, Christianity was the binding force, the arbitrating authority, the regulating economy, and the admonishing hive-mind of Western mankind. It formed a common mythos, a common cultural cement, and to a greater extent than is often credited, a common periodic table of morality for all levels of society from kings to commoners. It presented itself draped in common coinage, common iconography, and, crucially, a common language – at a time when the darkness and violence of everyday life otherwise encouraged a bitter, Balkan regionalism hunkered behind fortress walls and slit windows set in stone. Madigan is entirely right to stress the extent of this new Pax Romana:
The church not only formed the institutional framework within which one lived one's life. Every important event for the individual from birth to death (including, from the ninth century, marriage) was marked by ecclesiastical ritual. The same set of sacraments (set at seven in the late twelfth century) punctuated the lives of Christians in northern England and Iceland, southern Italy, western Spain, and Poland. Monasteries, churches, chapels, parish churches, convents, cathedrals, and simple stone crosses covered the landscape – all professing or representing the same creed.
(That business about dating Church regulation “from the ninth century” is an example of one of the only vestiges of an actual textbook still clinging to Madigan's work, that nervous nodding to some clutch of well-received monographs on the subject of early Christian marriage, but the reader can rest assured that if he wanted to get married in, say, fifth century Lyon, he wouldn't be slicing blood vessels and invoking Baal and Astoreth; it would have been an entirely Churchy affair.)
Madigan's story, in other words, is that of a glorious dominance (the angry complacence of which could easily be summarized in the once-famous line from Pope Boniface VIII's 1302 papal bull Unam Sacram: “It is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff”) slowly frittered away by rising literacy, Avignon exiles, and the smell of burning heretics in the morning.
Throughout the many stages of his story (this is a 500-page book that could easily have been 1500), Madigan consistently humanizes proceedings; he's a sensitive and insightful assessor of character, and it's one of the book's main delights to watch him read between the lines of his copious source material, as when he writes about the relative toleration enjoyed by Jews under the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths and then pauses to discuss the odd lenience of Pope Gregory on the subject, despite his published rantings about “filthy” unbelievers:
In practice, this pro-Jewish stance led Gregory on several occasions to prevent the confiscation of synagogues and sacred vessels and books and to forestall interference in Jewish ritual practice. Although Jews were not permitted to hold Christian slaves by either the Justinian or Theodosian laws, Gregory usually allowed the practice when it occurred (as he mock innocently put it) “in ignorance” or “accidentally.” This, however, may have been intended less to inconvenience Jewish merchants than to placate imperial officials, who certainly knew about the slave trade and were loathe to impede it. There are other instances in which Gregory acted on behalf of Jewish economic interests even when Roman law forbade him to do so.
The book follows the rise and ongoing transformation of the Church from the age of Constantine, through Crusades and Inquisitions, through the foundation of famous orders like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, through the outsized personalities of popes and holy men (and women – that aspect of Madigan's inclusivity is wonderfully done in these pages), and regularly throughout, there are quite arresting moments of the kind of revisionist appreciation that only comes from exhaustive study. His sparkling passage on the humble friar is my favorite example:
To a degree that can hardly be exaggerated, the narrative of the friars is a story of colossal and reverberating importance, achievement, and triumph. Today we often remember the friars for their intellectual accomplishments – and not without reason. But to the ordinary layperson living in the towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were welcomed as bringers of the good news of Christianity, a message that some of them had not heard before or had heard in profoundly qualified – and insulting – form. No friar ever told a layperson in the towns that he or she had little hope of salvation, or that his religious yearnings were silly, or that she had to rely on the merits accrued by cadres of monks or secular priests praying for her otherwise imperiled soul. No friar ever shut his door to a spiritually serious lay Christian.
Medieval Christianity may be, on some surface levels, the textbook its author calls it, but it's also much more than that, a narrative history of the first quality, a probingly researched and well-written account of the most appallingly successful theocracy in history. Madigan captures the power of it all and also the multifaceted humanity of it all, and he does it in a way the curious general reader, not just the poor overworked undergraduate, will find page-turningly fascinating. If you want one rock-solid book on Church history, this is it.