Eamon Duffy - Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity

Contents

In a hugely influential discussion of the end of the pagan classical world and the triumph of Christianity and Barbarism, Edward The scathing contempt which pervades that discussion in the twenty-eighth chapter of Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had twin sources, in the rationalism of Enlightenment thought, and in an older tradition of specifically Protestant historiography, which saw the history of medieval Catholicism as one long sad tale of decline into gross idolatry.

To most historians of Christianity till the late nineteenth century it seemed axiomatic that there were true and false versions of Gibbons pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model, however ironically he may have deployed the phrase. The history of the Church was the story of the unfolding of a single movement, founded by Christ and his Apostles, whose salient teachings distilled over time into the Creeds: there were right and wrong developments of Christianitys characteristic beliefs and institutions. For both Catholics and Protestants, true Christianity was marked above all by doctrinal orthodoxy, and stood sharply defined against deviant and erroneous forms of teaching, heresy. In a culture decisively shaped both by Protestantism and by the Enlightenment, medieval Christianity seemed quite clearly a decline from earlier purity, and such assumptions shaped even the terminology used to characterize immense and multifaceted tracts of time. So the term medieval, and its English equivalent, the Middle Ages, reflected the tacit conviction that almost a millennium of Western civilization was essentially a transitional period between one great age antiquity or the classical world and another the modern or proto-modern age of Renaissance (rebirth) and Reformation. The hierarchy of value that thereby privileged one period over another was even plainer in the term the Dark Ages, used to characterize the five centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire, centuries during which the distinctive institutions and identities of Europe had emerged.

Over the last couple of generations, most of those assumptions have crumbled. In a relativistic culture increasingly detached from the organized churches, historians are less inclined to privilege a particular story-line, and more prepared to view mainstream accounts of Christianity as the version of the foundation myth that happened to win out. Sober historians nowadays are prone to speak of Christianities in the plural, and to interest themselves in the rise of micro-Christendoms: the radically different and sometimes seemingly incompatible forms in which the Christian impulse, if it ever had been one impulse, metamorphosed and diversified as it adapted to changing times and new and disparate cultures.

Unsurprisingly, that more pluralistic way of thinking has led medieval scholarship away from institutional concern with the doings of popes, kings and bishops, or theological debate over the niceties of Christian doctrine, crucial as such things have been in Christian history. Interest has shifted towards the study of Christianity perhaps we should say Christianities first and foremost as a set of practices, the religious strategies adopted by the people of the past to make sense of their daily existence.

And with growing interest in the history of religion as practice has come the realization that Gibbons pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model is a mirage specifically, that Christianity is and has been, first and foremost, a materialistic religion. It is rooted in the belief that in the Incarnation the eternal Godhead took on human flesh in Wesleys words

So any attempt to understand Christianity must engage with the multifarious temporal practices and material artifacts by which it has expressed that central incarnational conviction.

Christianity is one of the three so-called Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam the great monotheisms that trace their origins to the religion of ancient Israel. All three can justly be characterized as religions of the book, because all three have at their heart reverence for a corpus of sacred scripture. But Christianity, for most of its history, has also been a religion in which the divine has been understood as immanent in and accessible through created matter: in the material elements of the sacraments (bread and wine, oil and water); in the painted or carved images of Christ and the saints; in the music and ceremonies of the liturgy; in the landscapes, routes and journeyings in which the shrines of the saints were located; and in the very flesh and bones of the holy dead themselves.

Most of the essays in this book reflect that growing historical interest in the material culture of Christianity, and in the practices by which the Christians of the past articulated their deepest convictions. The topics dealt with stretch over more than a thousand years, and range from the emergence in late antiquity of the Codex as the distinctive physical form of the Christian holy book, through medieval preoccupation with the bones, hair, teeth and blood of the saints, to the vehement Protestant rejection of the idolatrous millennium-old cult of holy images. Some of the chapters originated from engagement with the work of other scholars in extended review essays, others as attempts to explore and explain some of the distinctive expressions of the faith of medieval Christians the meaning for them of pilgrimage and holy place, the books which shaped their praying, the ebb and flow of fashion in the saints to whom they turned for help and healing, the strategies by which they mastered the universal human fear of death. For all their diversity, I hope that these essays have a common focus in a concern to understand the people of the past through the objects, places, beliefs and practices in which their deepest hopes and fears found expression.

Eamon Duffy

Feast of St Laurence, 2017

Early Christianity was more than a new religion: it brought with it a revolutionary shift in the information technology of the ancient world. That shift was to have implications for the cultural history of the world over the next two millennia at least as momentous as the invention of the Internet seems likely to have for the future. Like Judaism before it and Islam after it, Christianity is often described as a religion of the Book. The phrase asserts both an abstraction the centrality of authoritative sacred texts and their interpretation within the three Abrahamic religions and also a simple concrete fact: the importance of a material object, the book, in the history and practice of all three traditions.

To modern readers, the phrase is bound to evoke images of the book as we know it the family Bible, say: something printed (or, if ancient, written) on both sides of folded sheets of paper (or parchment), stitched in bundles between protective covers of a thicker and tougher material. But for ancient Israel, as for pagan Greece and Rome, the book implied no such thing. Instead, the word first and foremost denoted a literary unit inscribed on a long scroll or roll, formed from glued- or stitched-together membranes (initially of papyrus, later the tougher and more flexible parchment), whose contents were written in parallel columns at right angles to the length of the roll, normally on one side only. And this is the form in which the books of the Hebrew Bible are still read in synagogue worship.