Medieval Christianity: A New History

April 14, 2015
Medieval Christianity: A New History

The third of the four faculty book events of the semester took place on Tuesday, April 14, at 5:15PM, in the Center’s Common Room. This time, we discussed Medieval Christianity: A New History (Yale University Press 2015), by Professor Kevin J. Madigan (Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History). This impressive volume of more than 400 pages spans the years 500-1500 CE. In many respects it updates R. W. Southern’s classic Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970) for today’s student and scholar. It incorporates new materials, integrates women’s contributions fully into the telling of every aspect of Church history, erases the duality between “the Church from above” and “popular religion” for the sake of a more integral telling of Christian life, and includes more fully the story of the relationships among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In his presentation, Madigan described the challenges and tensions in thinking through the topic of “medieval Christianity” across the breadth of European civilization, and the necessity of telling the stories of the era in some detail, yet without expanding the volume to double or triple its length. 

The discussants were Professors Amy Hollywood (Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies) and Luis Manuel Girón Negrón (Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures). They opened up Madigan’s rich volume in different ways, in accord with their own expertise regarding the Middle Ages, and showed how Medieval Christianity successfully and importantly tells the story of era and, in terms of its method and style, exemplifies the best practices of historians working today. The general discussion that followed allowed for further conversation about the larger topic of the “Middle Ages,” and likely trends in scholarship over the next decades.

The last faculty book event of the semester will take place at 5:15PM on Monday, April 20 (Sperry Room Andover Hall) and deal with my own book, His Hiding Place Is Darkness: a Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence (Stanford University Press 2015).

—By Francis X. Clooney, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions

See also: Faculty Book