Barbarian Conversion [Hardcover]

Richard Fletcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1998

The conversion of the pagan world that began in the obscurity of the Dark Ages was in no way inevitable. England did not embrace Christianity until 627, and while confessing communities existed from Greenland to China by the millennium, the last European conversion occurred late in the Middle Ages, in 1386. How did it all happen--and why? In a work of splid scholarship that often reads like a detective story and that owes as much to keen intuition as to the mastery of difficult sources, Richard Fletcher lays out the story of the Christianization of Europe. It is a very large story, for conversion was not merely a matter of religious belief. Christianity brought with it enormous cultural baggage. With it came Latin literacy--books; Roman notions of law, property, and government--even the concept of town life, and Mediterranean customs, including new tastes in food, drink, and dress. Whether from faith or by force, conversion had an immense impact that is with us even today, and it is Richard Fletcher's achievement to make that impact felt and understood.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

What impels the leaders of a religion to begin systematically to convert an entire continent? How do they go about doing it? How thorough is the conversion to be? What roles do politics and military conquest play in such religious conversion? How does conversion proceed in society, and how does it change society? Fletcher is well qualified to answer these and many other related questions with respect to the Christianizing of Europe during the Middle Ages. The prize-winning author of Moorish Spain and The Search for El Cid, he teaches at the University of York and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. specializing in medieval Spanish history. Spanning an entire millennium and a whole continent, his new work is dauntingly broad in scope, but his lucid presentation and lively and engaging style will carry even casual readers smoothly along. Recommended for both academic and public libraries.?James F. DeRoche, Alexandria, Va.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Fletcher weaves a rich tapestry out of a complex array of materials. He carefully addresses a nonspecialist audience, largely abandoning explanation of the acceptance of Christianity in favor of description of it. Guided by 10 considerations concerning evangelism and conversion, communication and acceptance, he is sensitive to the various ways in which Europe was Christianized and Christianity Europeanized during the course of a thousand years and amid considerable cultural, geographic, and linguistic diversity. Because of his 10-point agenda and because he resists dissolving stories into a single master narrative, his rambling but not superficial description depicts a conversion process that amounted to the continuing invention of Europe, a process that was cultural, not isolatedly individual, and intimately connected with economic, social, and political developments that often involved, as Fletcher puts it, "looking both ways." The conversion Fletcher describes extended beyond the temporal and geographic limits he sets, of course, and his narrative provides essential background for understanding Christianity's shape and cultural impact today, at the end of its second millennium. Steve Schroeder

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1St Edition edition (March 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805027637
• ISBN-13: 978-0805027631
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #850,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant work of history, November 13, 2001

By 

Sarah Rowley (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Paperback)

Fletcher's _The Barbarian Conversion_ is the best book on this subject I have read. As a longtime student of the early medieval era, I enjoyed Fletcher's perceptive and astute elucidation of this well-buried era. In some sections of the book, I had read (often repeatedly) every primary source mentioned, and I was continually astonished at the way he drew new insights out of familiar material. Although the middle section does drag a bit (particularly the chapter about the conversion of Scandinavia and Viking settlements), on the whole I love the author's style, his penchant for witty comments, and his eye for humor in his material. Seldom has a book on the early Middle Ages made me laugh out loud as much as this one. It's the details--a woman's garment that shows the adoption of Byzantine necklace fashions, the Greenlander who purchases a bishop for his fledgling settlement with a live polar bear--that bring history to life, and this book is full of them. Never forgetting the complexities of his material, and often showing that the line between Christians and pagans was never firm, Fletcher illuminates an often obscure story.

I also want to add that this book provides the best overview of the situation of the Jews in Europe during the early Middle Ages that I have ever seen (and I have been looking). Most authors begin with the persecutions of 1096 and only toss off a line about the tolerance that marked the first 500 years of the Middle Ages; Fletcher actually examines the tensions and accomodations during those centuries, and his account has thoroughly persuaded me that looking at the fluidity between Judaism and Christianity casts a needed light on the larger characters of both religions at that moment in history. Likewise, his extensive treatment of the conversions of the Slavic and Baltic regions alongside the more familiar terrain of Western Europe is a welcome reminder that the history of the Middle Ages must include Eastern Europe. Although only a devotee of the subject matter would want to read a 500-odd page book on the barbarian conversions, a medievalist who does will be richly rewarded.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview of an obscure period, January 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Paperback)

I bought this book hoping that I would be able to find out what it was the Barbarians were being converted *from*. But as the author states over and over again : we simply do not know what they believed in. The author gives a few hints as to what Pagan beliefs might have been, but can't do much else. There is no pagan philosophy to be had.

So, it took me a while took get over that little disappointment.

But when I stopped waiting for some non-existant explanation of pre-Christian beliefs, I found that this is actually quite a good book. Many other people have already described the main themes, so I won't bother. But one thing I will say, is that the book covers a huge amount of ground and is a very good overview of a little-know period in Church history.

I would recommend reading this right after "Who wrote the New Testament" That book leaves off in about 400 after the solid foundation of the Christian Church proper had been established and Fletcher's book begins just as Christianity has taken a firm hold in Rome. The two back to back give a thorough history of the early church as a political, military, and diplomatic institution, rather than some mystical brotherhood.

Yeah, it's a little dense in places, but it's still worth it.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars That Old Time Religion, January 9, 2002

By 

Douglas Harper (Lancaster, Pa., U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Paperback)

An authoritative account of how Christianity made the leap from the disintegrating Roman Empire to the "barbarian" tribes that toppled it -- largely by selling itself as part of the package deal of Roman civilization. Fletcher gives accounts, sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing, of how Christian missionaries won over the kings and warlords and worried about the common folk later. Amid the stories of sacred groves hacked down and idols burned are many more ambivalent cases where a pagan custom or shrine was simply given a Christian paint job. Fletcher also knows how to find the little details that open up big pictures. Such as the Northumbrian Priests' Law, a code of conduct attributed to Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1000-1023) that laid down four rules for the Anglo-Saxon men of God: Clergy must shave regularly, must not bring their weapons to church, must try to keep out of fights, and must not perform as "ale minstrels."