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Introduction

What Are the Middle Ages?

The term Middle Ages, or its adjectival form medieval, refers to a chronological period covering roughly a thousand years, from AD 500 to AD 1500. The beginning of the period is marked by the end of the Late Antique World in Western Europe, and in particular by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century under the weight of barbarian invasions. Its end is marked by the rise of Modernity, and in particular by the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the discovery of the New World.

These demarcations should make clear that the term Middle Ages exclusively describes Western Europe, as these events had little direct effect upon Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, or other regions of the world.

A book about the Middle Ages is thus necessarily a book about Western Europe, although this book will attempt to incorporate some figures from outside this region—Greek Byzantium, for example—mainly for the purposes of comparison. Most historians tend to subdivide the medieval period into the Early Middle Ages (sixth through tenth centuries), the High Middle Ages (eleventh through thirteenth), and the Late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth) in order to draw attention to the full flowering of economic, political, and literary culture that occurred in the middle period.

The term Dark Ages is often erroneously used to describe the Middle Ages as a whole, whereas if the term should be used at all (which is doubtful), it should be used only for the earlier period.

Three dominant tasks occupied medieval Christians during this thousand-year period: the rebuilding of civilization, the missionary work of the Church, and the pursuit of the glory of God. Some background regarding those tasks will help us better appreciate the dynamic Christians discussed in this book.

The Rebuilding of Civilization

Whatever its defects, the civilization of Late Antiquity, as found in the fourth-century Roman Empire, boasted a set of cultural achievements which were the envy of the world. The Greek culture upon which Rome was built supplied a foundation of literary and philosophical wisdom: the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, the poetry of Homer, the science of Galen and Ptolemy, the mathematics of Euclid and Pythagoras, and a fine-tuned liberal-arts curriculum designed to transmit this wisdom to future generations. The Romans themselves had added a superstructure of legal precision, military skill, and political apparatus that allowed the Caesars to place the whole Mediterranean world under their sway.

All of this, however, was gone by the end of the fifth century. What used to be called the barbarian invasions, but which are now more kindly referred to as the Germanic immigration movements, strained the Roman infrastructure beyond what it could handle. The city of Rome itself was sacked by Goths in AD 410. The empire lingered on, with diminishing borders, until the last emperor was deposed in 476. What was once the empire, at least in the West (in the East, the empire survived in Greek Byzantium), was replaced by a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms that knew nothing of Greek or Roman culture.

With no one to maintain it, the intellectual and civic infrastructure of Western Europe rapidly collapsed—schools, libraries, hospitals, roads, bridges, garrisons, urban centers, and everything that depended on them.

One of the central tasks of the Early Middle Ages was to rebuild this structure. Governments had to be erected, law codes written, borders defended, fields cleared, trade routes reestablished, cities rebuilt, schools and hospitals founded, libraries stocked—in short, civilization had to be established from the ground up. While the Dark Ages has become the stuff of jokes for its low level of culture, it was in fact a miracle that culture survived at all. But survive it did. By the High Middle Ages, Western Europe could boast of an organized system of schools and universities; a highly efficient—if imperfect—social, economic, and political system (collectively known as feudalism); precise law codes; centralized nation-states (some complete with parliaments and elected officials); an impressive array of scientific and technological developments; and a strong corpus of original artistic, musical, literary, and architectural works.

Hostile ethnic groups which had invaded, looted, and ravished the countryside—barbarians, Vikings, Magyars, and Turks—were subjugated, assimilated, converted, or at least held at bay. And all of this was engineered not by some centralized, coordinating secular state power, but largely by bishops, monks, priests, nuns, and ordinary Christians.

Before proceeding, it may be worthwhile to consider the map on Page 21, which will give a sense of the geographic shape of Europe at the dawn of the Middle Ages. Note the Roman Empire lingering on in the East, stretching from Greece in the northwest through modern-day Turkey and Palestine, all the way to Egypt in the south, with its capital at Constantinople (later Byzantium) on the Black Sea.

Note also the various Germanic, barbarian kingdoms covering North Africa, Spain, France, Britain, and Germany. Within two centuries, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, and modern-day Palestine and much of Turkey would be transformed into Muslim caliphates, and Viking (Norman) incursions would reshape much of the northern coasts of Western Europe. But this, more or less, is the region in which medieval Christianity took shape.

The Missionary Work of the Church

Many Christians in the fourth-century Roman Empire could boast that the command of Christ to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) had been fulfilled in their own day, which many of them called “our Christian times” (tempora Christiana). After all, the vast majority of the population—from the emperor down to the lowest servants—were professing Christians. Yet the tumultuous period of the Early Middle Ages would flip this situation upside down, as Christians often found themselves as small minorities being ruled by new, non-Christian populations such as Goths or Muslims. Additionally, deep disagreements over theology meant that even some purportedly Christian populations were somewhat less than orthodox—the Arians, Monophysites, Albigensians, and many others.

The work of proclaiming the Gospel to these populations was another central task of the Middle Ages. But the work of missionaries was only the beginning. It had to be followed up with the task of catechizing the converts, forming them in the faith and establishing permanent pastoral structures—parishes, dioceses, seminaries, monasteries, and so forth—to guarantee that the faith would be passed on effectively and in its entirety. The hard work of theological debate and apologetics was necessary to bring back into the fold heterodox and wayward believers.

As Christian populations expanded, Church structures had to grow more centralized and coordinated—witness, for example, the unprecedented work of the medieval papacy in coordinating the growth of the medieval Church. These structures themselves, of course, were not immune from corruption and abuse, necessitating constant work on the part of Church reformers. Even more, political rulers were always eager to manipulate the Church and her structures for their own ends, requiring clear safeguards to maintain the purity of the Church’s spiritual mission.

The Pursuit of the Glory of God

Aside from these urgent tasks necessitated by the changed social conditions of the Middle Ages, we should not forget the most central goal of the Church, “that in everything God may be glorified” (1 Pt 4:11)—the regular work of prayer, contemplation, and worship that must go on in any and all historical conditions. While rarely registering on the radar of historians, this work was clearly at the very heart of medieval Christianity, as all of the sources bear witness. The tireless and unceasing prayer of Christians in chapels and shrines, the journeys of pilgrims, the chanting of the Divine Office in the monasteries, the solemn meditation of contemplatives and hermits, and the daily Eucharistic sacrifice formed and crowned it all.

The fervency and sincerity of medieval piety is proven by the great monastic movements that flourished in this period (the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican orders, for example), the soaring architectural achievement of medieval cathedrals, and the unparalleled intellectual accomplishments of the medieval scholars such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anselm.

The cultivation of knowledge and love of God was not just an extraneous hobby of the medieval world: it was its beating heart.

The Scope and Purpose of This Book

I am convinced that many of the challenges that Christians face today are not new, and not terribly different from the challenges that Christians faced in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christians also faced an often hostile and secularizing culture, the tensions of religious pluralism, an aggressive state eager to usurp the religious liberty of the Church, the scandal caused by immoral and worldly clergy, and many other issues. In that era, Christians rose to these challenges in heroic, intelligent, creative, and dynamic ways, and I am convinced that their responses can inspire and prepare us to face the similar challenges of our own times.

It may seem odd to some that I view the Middle Ages as relevant at all. After all, the popular culture has reduced the medieval Church to a crude caricature—a primitive, superstitious, ignorant, violent, and backward lot that we would all do better to shove under the carpet: irrelevant at best, and embarrassing at worst. As a matter of fact, the very term medieval was an invention of fifteenth-century Renaissance scholars who wished to denigrate this historical “valley” between the twin cultural peaks of ancient and modern civilizations.

But in my ten years of teaching Church history, I have witnessed time and time again—and these times are among my favorite moments as a teacher—that my students, after picking up and reading medieval literature firsthand, are captivated by its relevance. Contrary to the typical narrative peddled by the contemporary secular culture, sources reveal medieval Christianity to be intellectually inquisitive, spiritually vibrant, dynamic and world-affirming, sincerely held, and culturally diverse.

This is why, as a writer and a teacher, I have always preferred to use primary texts from the historical period in question, rather than substituting modern scholarship. In other words, I would a thousand times prefer that a young reader actually pick up Augustine’s Confessions and hear this wonderful saint tell his own life story than resort to a textbook on Augustine purchased at a bookstore. I have found that the lives of men and women from the past come to life when we read about them in their own words. This is even more true of the saints, whose writings seem to exude a sanctity all to themselves, which often gets lost when it is reduced to a paragraph summary in a contemporary textbook.

Even more, I have found that history works best when its focus is on concrete individuals, real personalities, rather than a broad survey of dates, events, and vague generalizations. This is why I have chosen to structure this book not so much chronologically or thematically, but around the lives of real persons—the lives of the saints.

The faithful men and women of the Middle Ages—those who passed on the Faith so heroically and at such great cost—still retain their power to inspire, to capture imaginations, and to teach those willing to learn.

Who Are the Medieval Saints?

Narrowing down the list of candidates for inclusion in this book was nothing short of agonizing. Every name crossed off the list, to my mind, represented a piece of the brilliant mosaic of medieval Christianity. Numerous readers will groan to find their favorite figure excluded and can take consolation that I groaned twice as loudly. Allow me to share a few brief considerations that I took into account.

First, not all the figures in this book are canonized saints. It was not until the year 1234 that the Catholic Church developed a centralized, organized procedure for declaring people saints. Until that time sainthood functioned more informally: if enough people began to treat someone as a saint—recalling her virtues, for example, or preserving her relics, visiting her tomb, praying to her, saying Masses in her honor—and if this pattern continued for long enough and spread widely enough, the person began to be called a saint, and that was that.

But some of the figures in this book wouldn’t even be considered saints by this less formal procedure. Usually there are good reasons: no one knew enough about the personal lives of Julian of Norwich or pseudo-Dionysius (though their writings were impeccable), Justinian’s and Charlemagne’s personal lives left something to be desired (though they did more for the Church than anyone else in their eras), Meister Eckhart’s and Gregory of Palamas’ writings were controversial in some places (though their sincerity was never in question), and so on. But it seemed better to include figures of great historical and religious significance, and who generally led praiseworthy lives, than to be overly rigid about survivors of the canonization process.

I have taken great effort to include Doctors of the Church whenever possible, although some have been regrettably omitted. The term Doctor, Latin for “teacher,” is used to recognize those saints who have made particularly important contributions to the Church’s theological tradition: usually they are theologians, though sometimes mystics or pastors have received the honor.

A greater effort has been made to ensure that the book presents a representative sampling of medieval Christianity. Too many treatments of this period resemble a roll call of celibate male clerics. Without casting doubts upon the immense contributions carried out by churchmen during the Middle Ages, it would be a shame to overlook the work done by laity, and by women in particular, in carrying on the faith in this period. For this reason, I have included six women as subjects of this book, and six married persons.

As a professional theologian, I have worked hard to overcome a prejudice for my own discipline, and to fight the tendency to write nothing but biographies of university professors. Instead, to capture the diversity of contributions made by the medieval saints, I have come up with several categories into which to group them. Admittedly, they are somewhat superficial; most of these personalities are so multifaceted that they are hard to pin down!

First are the missionaries, those who devoted their lives to the spread and proclamation of the Gospel.

Next is the group I call the leaders—those who founded institutions, ruled nations, or simply rose to the occasion when intelligent and creative leadership was needed in the Church or society.

Third, we have the martyrs, those who paid the cruel price of fidelity to the Gospel, shedding their blood in the name of Christ.

Fourthly, those I call monastics, who dedicated their lives to the values of poverty, chastity, and obedience to give witness to the kingdom of God.

Next, mystics who excelled at a life of prayer and communicated to others the path to a mature spiritual life.

Sixth, the thinkers, the intellectuals who helped to develop, clarify, and defend the Church’s theological and philosophical traditions.

I have ended the book with a seventh group, Eastern Christians, who carried out some of these same tasks in the regions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Of course, some figures fit in more than one category, and a rather arbitrary judgment call had to be made. For example, Boethius is undeniably a thinker, a martyr, and a leader.

As for the specific writing selections, I have tried—as with the choice of writers—to find a balance between high quality selections and diverse, representative samples. The reader will find theological and philosophical tracts, commentaries, dialogues, homilies, letters, scientific treatises, last wills, judicial transcripts, biographies and autobiographies, prayers, hymns, poetry, legislation, and much more. I have tried to select writings from the saints themselves, but when this was not possible (Elizabeth of Hungary, for example, left no writings) I have opted for the writings of their friends or associates, or at least near contemporaries.

The vast majority of Western medieval writers wrote in Latin, of course; Eastern writers, in Greek. In some cases I have made my own translations; in a few cases permission has been graciously granted to use those of others. In the majority of cases I have simply adapted older, public-domain translations, updating them for readability. Readability has to be balanced against fidelity to the original texts, and I have consistently favored the former without (I hope) doing violence to the latter.

This book is not written with scholars in mind, and those who wish to use these texts for scholarly ends will likely complain of the absence of some elements they have come to expect (reference to critical editions, footnotes with variant translations, and similar material). My aim throughout has been to produce writing samples that are clear, concise, and enjoyable to read, yet which remain substantially true to the original texts. A bibliography at the end of the book indicates which sources I consulted for each chapter.