The Middle Range

The Middle Ages stretched for 1,000 years at least, from the disintegration of the western Roman Empire to the Reformation, and included religious developments and figures that seem perennially interesting to moderns: the Crusades, the Inquisition, monasticism, mysticism, St. Francis of Assisi, Abelard and Heloise, Joan of Arc. In his efforts to appeal to a broad, not necessarily academic, audience, Madigan generally doesn’t disappoint: He writes clearly and gracefully (no irritating postmodernist jargon); he is obviously knowledgeable about his subject matter; and he never talks down to his readers, whose intelligence he respects.

In his preface, Madigan tells us that he has “written at length on women in virtually every chapter of this book.” This reads like obsequious feminist correctness, except for the fact that the Western Middle Ages marked the first time in human history that women exerted significant cultural influence—as queens, abbesses, mystics, writers, patronesses of the arts, and, of course, saints.

Yet Madigan’s book, although admittedly informative, tells as least as much about the preoccupations, ideological and otherwise, of today’s academic historians of the Middle Ages as it does about the Middle Ages themselves. For example, while Medieval Christianity follows the general chronological order of the Middle Ages, starting with Rome’s fall and ending with the dawn of modernity in the early 16th century, the book is organized primarily in terms of topics. This seems to reflect the disdain of many contemporary historians for “diachronic”—that is, strictly sequential—accounts of human history in favor of “synchronic” approaches that examine events as related clusters. (The terms come from the early-20th-century linguistics scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, a seminal influence on academic postmodernism.) 

Madigan’s topical approach works fairly well for the later Middle Ages, when there are clearly discrete topics to discuss: the rise of the university, the expanding claims of the papacy, the founding of specific religious orders. But it creates confusion in his earlier chapters dealing with centuries in which historical developments were more interdependent. A chapter on the conversion of northern Europe, spanning the fifth through the seventh centuries, describes the role of Irish monks and their Celtic form of monasticism. But it is only in the following chapter that Madigan discusses the institution of monasticism itself, touching all too briefly on the Christian ascetic tradition’s origins in Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Middle East before migrating to the West. 

The German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (ca. 1098-1179) was a monumental figure of the 12th century, not only as a musician, playwright, poet, pharmacist, and mystical theologian, but also as a monastic reformer typical of her century in her desire to return to more primitive and less worldly forms of the cenobitic life. But instead of placing Hildegard alongside other 12th-century monastic luminaries—such as the Cistercian giant Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), with whom she corresponded and who acted as her theological defender and de facto publicist—Madigan stuffs her into the very last chapter, which deals with late-medieval mystical writers such as Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-ca. 1328). 

Conversely, Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342-ca. 1416), a genuine late-medieval mystical writer of the first order, gets shuffled up to an earlier chapter that deals mostly with the 12th century. Presumably, this is because Julian was an anchoress, living a solitary religious life in a cell attached to a church, and anchoritism got its start as a widespread medieval phenomenon during the 12th century. An organizational approach with a clearer focus on chronology and the ways in which the passage of time shaped and changed medieval religious culture would help readers better understand the historical context and importance of Hildegard, Julian, and other medieval figures who attract Madigan’s attention. It is jarring, for example, to read a long discussion of the New Testament writers’ varying portrayals of Jesus plunked into the middle of a chapter whose stated topic is St. Francis and the Franciscans.

A second, and more serious, problem is Madigan’s tendency to rely heavily on the conclusions that other historians have drawn about medieval ecclesiastical developments instead of formulating his own. This, too, seems to reflect a fashionable academic trend: viewing the study of history as essentially the study of historiography, or how other historians have written history. Historiographic approaches—examining critically how the methodology, interests, and biases of historians past and present have shaped their interpretations of their source materials—are wonderful training best done in graduate school or in upper-division seminars for those aiming to write history themselves. But Madigan tends to summarize other historians’ interpretations uncritically and without presenting objections and counterarguments, which can give the impression that he regards those interpretations as authoritative. 

This approach can be effective when Madigan is summarizing the ideas of universally recognized giants in their academic specialties: Bernard McGinn at the University of Chicago on medieval mysticism (McGinn was Madigan’s mentor as a graduate student), for example, or Caroline Walker Bynum at Columbia and the Institute for Advanced Study on themes in medieval spirituality.

It is less effective, and can look like logrolling nods to friendly scholars, when Madigan cites an eccentric monograph on a niche topic, such as Patrick Geary’s Furta Sacra (1978), an anthropology-laced study of thefts of saints’ relics. Worse is when the book that Madigan summarizes is highly tendentious, such as The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), in which R. I. Moore argues that the clerical class hounded Jews, heretics, and even lepers during the High Middle Ages primarily as a tactic for consolidating its own political power. You would never guess from reading Medieval Christianity that Moore’s theories have been severely criticized by other scholars as failing to (among other things) account for the specifically religious motivations of the persecutors, however wrongheaded by present-day standards.

Madigan’s book is at its weakest—and clearly its most dependent on other scholars’ faddish points of view—in its opening chapter, which tries to inform the reader about the very early Christianity of the Roman Empire during its first four centuries. This period is technically outside of Madigan’s medieval purview, but it is understandable that he would include it. The fourth-century church fathers Augustine of Hippo and Jerome (who translated the Bible into the Vulgate Latin version that was authoritative during the Middle Ages) were towering figures to learned medievals. Furthermore, if you are going to examine medieval Christianity, it helps to know some of the basic tenets of Christianity itself. 

But Madigan has chosen as his scholarly guru for this opening chapter the avant-garde German New Testament scholar Walter Bauer, whose Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934) argued that there was no such thing as the basic tenets of early Christianity. Bauer maintained that early Christianity was a hodgepodge of divergent and competing beliefs about Jesus from the very beginning, and that what we today call Christian “orthodoxy” represents merely the theology of the victors in a protracted intra-ecclesiastical political struggle. 

As might be expected, Bauer’s views remain immensely popular among the avant-garde New Testament scholars of today, who like to think that the evil church fathers relentlessly stamped out equally valid alternative “Christianities” that might have been more compatible with modern expectations of what a religion ought to be like. Yet there has also been quite a bit of pushback over the past 80 years from other scholars who argue that there is actually very little documentary evidence to support Bauer’s thesis. So, instead of starting off by informing readers that even the most outré of early Christians believed that a Jewish carpenter named Jesus had risen from the dead in some fashion and had given his followers a mandate to spread his teachings—which accounted for the rapid proliferation of Christian communities throughout the Roman Empire, whose western bounds were more or less coterminous with medieval Europe—Madigan devotes the opening pages of the chapter to a lengthy exposition of Gnosticism and other arcane heresies. This is not only confusing, it is irrelevant to any understanding of Christianity in the Middle Ages, when basic Christian doctrines were largely settled. Most medieval “heretics” dissented about the structure of the church, not the nature of Jesus.

Madigan’s chapters on medieval Christians’ encounters and conflicts with Muslims and Jews are—perhaps predictably, perhaps unavoidably—colored by 21st-century hindsight. To his credit, Madigan is not a starry-eyed romantic when it comes to the supposed paradise of religious tolerance and multicultural convivencia that the Islamic rulers of what had once been eastern and western Christendom were said to have fostered. He is forthright about the second-class dhimmi status of both Jews and Christians in medieval Islamic territories, and about the tensions and outbursts of violence that marked ordinary life in a world whose conquering rulers classified Christians and Jews as infidels. Still, Madigan can’t resist chiding medieval Christians for daring to feel the same way about medieval Muslims as medieval Muslims felt about them. “It was the beginning of a long, mutual misunderstanding,” he writes. Talk about an understatement! 

As for medieval Christians’ attitude toward Jews, Madigan, like many others, draws a straight line from medieval anti-Judaism to the Holocaust. While it is undeniably true that Christian treatment of the surprisingly substantial Jewish communities in Western Europe during the Middle Ages often ranged from condescendingly hostile to downright nasty and homicidal—except when Christians needed, as they often did, Jewish financing and Jewish medical expertise—Madigan fails to delve into the specifically medieval aspects of this antipathy. Unlike the antisemites of Western modernity, the Christians of the Middle Ages had little interest in racial and ideological pollution. Their reaction to Jews was primarily one of religious incomprehension: that they had failed to recognize Jesus as the promised Messiah and instead, as recounted in the Gospels, had sought his death as an impostor. Medieval Christian fiction contained tales of Jewish blood libel, but an equally popular theme was Jewish conversion to Christianity, whether by the intervention of the Virgin Mary or by some Eucharistic miracle. And in truth, judging from the subject matter of the vast proliferation of medieval literature preserved in manuscripts, most medieval Christians paid scarcely any attention to Jews at all.

This is not to say that Madigan has written a bad book. He has obviously spent a large amount of time surveying and conscientiously abridging library shelves’ worth of scholarship in fields that are clearly not his specialty. Furthermore, any attempt to arrive at an understanding of a period of history that spanned more than 10 centuries and encompassed a huge range of local cultures deserves commendation. Madigan’s suggestions for further reading are generally sound and informed—although I would have omitted some books and included others. Still, for all his efforts, Medieval Christianity is ultimately disappointing. If only the author had not striven so painfully to produce an introduction to medieval Christianity reflecting the very latest in current academic thinking, but, rather, had simply introduced his readers to medieval Christianity on its own terms.

Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.