This study offers new insights into early medieval Christianity, exploring how religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe.

A re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writersas singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.

Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

While historians of Christianity have generally acknowledged some degree of Germanic influence in the development of early medieval Christianity, Russell goes further, arguing for a fundamental Germanic reinterpretation of Christianity. This first full-scale treatment of the subject follows a truly interdisciplinary approach, applying to the early medieval period a sociohistorical method similar to that which has already proven fruitful in explicating the history of Early Christianity and Late Antiquity. The encounter of the Germanic peoples with Christianity is studied from within the larger context of the encounter of a predominantly "world-accepting" Indo-European folk-religiosity with predominantly "world-rejecting" religious movements. While the first part of the book develops a general model of religious transformation for such encounters, the second part applies this model to the Germano-Christian scenario. Russell shows how a Christian missionary policy of temporary accommodation inadvertently contributed to a reciprocal Germanization of Christianity.

"A history of doctrines of the early Church, written and arranged with exceptional clarity by a leading patristic scholar, the principal of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Canon Kelly describes the development of the principal Christian doctrines from the close of the first century to the middle of the fifth, and from the end of the apostolic age to the council of Chalcedon. His book thus covers the great doctrinally creative period in the Church's history, the centuries in which there was a constant upsurge of fresh ideas before the settled formalism of both the East and West. He gives the student and invaluable outline of Church history and patrology against which to place the evolving theological doctrines which he summarises and expounds" -- Back cover.

The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.