Western European civilization in the medieval centuries was a time of significant development as the ascendency of the Roman Catholic Church spread Christianity throughout Europe. This book examines the religious life of this formative period, the history of the institutional Church, and focuses on the interaction between the Church and secular members of society. This new edition has been updated, and includes new visual evidence and a glossary of technical terms.

These ten essays by John Van Engen situate religion in the history of medieval Western Europe: as an unavoidable presence in everyday life, as a conceptual framework for social and political life, as a force integral to its historical dynamics. Four of the essays are bibliographical and retrospective in nature, reviewing the field broadly, but also pointing toward a more dialectical approach to understanding the interaction of religion and society in the European middle ages. Other studies deal with large topics usually subsumed under the abstract term 'Christianization'. They grapple with learned sources as well as those associated with 'popular' religion, and show what can be gained from an imaginative use of all that lawyers and theologians said about religion in their society. The essays, finally, look for the quality and dynamic of change, even inventiveness, released by religious action and conviction in medieval European society.

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying … ? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so … but philosophers lead a very different life … So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

St Katherine of Alexandria was one of the most popular saints in both the Orthodox and Latin Churches in the later Middle Ages, yet there has been little study of how her cult developed before c. 1200. This book redresses the balance, providing a thorough examination of the way the cult spread from the Greek-speaking lands of the Eastern Mediterranean and into Western Europe. The author uses the full range of source material available, including liturgical texts, hagiographies, chronicles and iconographical evidence, bringing together these often disparate sources to map the way in which the cult of St Katherine grew from its early stages in the Byzantine Empire up to c.1100, its transmission to Italy, and the introduction and development of the cult in Normandy and England up to c.1200. The book also includes appendices listing early manuscripts containing Katherine's Passio and including key original texts on St Katherine of the period. This study will be welcomed by scholars of medieval history and the history of medieval art, and as a case-study for all those with an interest in the development of medieval saint's cults.

After the Roman empire fell, medieval Europe continued to be fascinated by Rome itself, the 'chief of cities'. Once the hub of empire, in the early medieval period Rome became an important centre for western Christianity, first of all as the place where Peter, Paul and many other important early Christian saints were martyred: their deaths for the Christian faith gave the city the appellation 'Roma Felix', 'Happy Rome'. But in Rome the history of the faith, embodied in the shrines of the martyrs, coexisted with the living centre of the western Latin church. Because Peter had been recognised by Christ as chief among the apostles and was understood to have been the first bishop of Rome, his successors were acknowledged as patriarchs of the West and Rome became the focal point around which the western Latin church came to be organised. This book explores ways in which Rome itself was preserved, envisioned, and transformed by its residents, and also by the many pilgrims who flocked to the shrines of the martyrs. It considers how northern European cultures (in particular, the Irish and English) imagined and imitated the city as they understood it. The fourteen articles presented here range from the fourth to the twelfth century and span the fields of history, art history, urban topography, liturgical studies and numismatics. They provide an introduction to current thinking about the ways in which medieval people responded to the material remains of Rome's classical and early Christian past, and to the associations of centrality, spirituality, and authority which the city of Rome embodied for the earlier Middle Ages. Acknowledgements for grants in aid of publication are due to the Publication Fund of the College of Arts, Humanities, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork; to the Publication Fund of the National University of Ireland, Dublin; and to the Office of the Provost, Ohio Wesleyan University.

Constance Hoffman Berman presents an indispensable collection of the most influential and revisionist work to be done on religion in the Middle Ages in the last two decades. Bringing together an authoritative list of scholars from around the world, this book is a comprehensive compilation of the most important work in this field. Medieval Religion provides a valuable service for all those who study the Middle Ages, church history or religion.

Discusses German influence on the development of early medieval Christianity.