medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

a very perceptive review of what looks like a very interesting book.

c

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Received: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:58:12 PM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 06.11.14 Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons (Lifshitz)

Reff, Daniel T. <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons: Sacred Narratives and
the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New</i>. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 304 (hb), 302 (pb). $60.00 (hb),
$21.99 (pb), $18.99 (Adobe e-book). ISBN-13 9780521840781, ISBN-10
0521840783 (hb), ISBN-13 9780521600507, ISBN-10 0521600502 (pb), ISBN-13
9780511079481, ISBN-10 0511079486 (e-book).

    Reviewed by Felice Lifshitz
         Florida International University/Institute for Advanced Study
         [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]

The publisher of <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons</i> has announced for
2006 (now postponed to 2007) the publication of a collection of essays
entitled <i>Plague and the End of Antiquity. The Pandemic of 541–
750</i>. It is not a little shocking that <i>Plague and the End of
Antiquity</i>, edited by Lester Little, will be the first volume ever
published on the subject. According to the publisher's website, the
essays will show how the "story is intertwined with the decline of
Rome and the rise of Islam." Surely these are among the most important
stories, if not <i>the</i> most important stories, of late antiquity
and the early Middle Ages, and the plague appears perhaps to have been
central to both epoch-making developments. Over the past few decades,
the period in question has been the subject of intense research by
ever-larger numbers of scholars, resulting in a mounting and virtually
insurmountable pile of publications. Yet this army of specialists
appears to have, until now, drastically underestimated the
significance of one of the most important factors in the
transformation of the Roman world: disease.

Happily, the centrality of disease as a causal factor in human
history--including the history of the later Roman Empire and the
European early Middle Ages--did not escape the notice of one non-
specialist: Daniel Reff, a professor in the intriguingly innovative
Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, whose
publications heretofore have concerned the sixteenth through
eighteenth-century Americas. With some guidance from medievalist
colleagues at OSU, such as Joseph Lynch and the late Nicholas Howe,
Reff's fresh outsider eyes have been able to perceive aspects of
Mediterranean and European history that have long eluded the gazes of
specialists. The findings of his study enable us to add to the above
list of important developments with which the story of the plague is
intertwined, "the rise of Christianity" (a theme apparently not
addressed in the Little collection). Reff writes, with the clarity
characteristic of the entire monograph, "...the Christianization of
pagan Europe and Indian Mexico were coincident with epidemics of acute
and chronic infectious disease that undermined the structure and
functioning of pagan and Indian societies, respectively. Both pagans
in Europe and Indians in Mexico were attracted to Christian beliefs
and rituals because they provided a means of comprehending and dealing
with epidemic disease and calamity. The organizational strategies
based on charity and reciprocity that were implemented by early
Christians and later by missionaries in Mexico also were particularly
attractive in the context of profound sociocultural upheaval" (1-2).
The rest of the book systematically demonstrates the truth of this
entire proposition, although this review will concentrate only on that
part of the comparative study most likely to be of interest to the
readers of <i>TMR</i>.

I read <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons</i> last academic year with the
students in my graduate Historical Methodologies seminar, where it
functioned admirably as an illustration of the potential virtues, and
the inevitable shortcomings, of the comparative approach. Into the
latter category fall Reff's lack of knowledge of the languages of the
sources for the "Old World," his reliance on translated versions of
published editions of European texts (as compared with his in-depth
analyses of unpublished sources from multiple archives in the "New
World"), and his relative unfamiliarity with scholarship on late- and
post-Roman "Christendom" (witness the absence from his bibliography of
some mainstay names such as Walter Goffart, Rosamond McKitterick and
Walter Pohl), all of which renders the study somewhat lopsided.
Nevertheless, I learned more from Reff's Chapter Two, "Disease and the
Rise of Christianity in Europe, 150 – 800 C.E." (35 – 121) than I have
learned from many books by eminent specialists in the field. More
significant from a methodological perspective, I learned more about
the conversion of Europeans to Christianity from Reff's analyses of
sermons, histories, miracle stories and saints' biographies from the
period than I learned from my own readings of those very same sources
almost twenty years ago, when I abandoned a dissertation project on
late Roman and early Medieval mission and conversion in the belief
that we could never actually know what happened, only how it was
represented in later narratives.[1] Nor had I ever noticed, while
writing an M.A. thesis on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to
Christianity, that Gregory the Great's Roman mission was prompted by a
report that the plague was hitting Kent (94).

Reff's depiction of "what actually happened" is extremely persuasive.
He has brought to bear on the relevant sources a critical apparatus
that appears to be absent from the tool boxes of most late Romanists
and early Medievalists alike. <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons</i>
continues the venerable tradition of studies of the impact of disease
in history represented by the work of Noble David Cook, Alfred W.
Crosby, William H. McNeill and others working in fields where material
causality never went so dramatically out of style as it has among
specialists in Late Antiquity.[2] He is probably correct in his
estimation that "too often Christian 'ideas' and discourse about
charity, virginity, suffering, and so on, have been divorced from
daily life" (119). Reff makes the very sensible point that "the
realization that reality infrequently is directly accessible through
literature should not keep us from acknowledging that real things
happen to real people" (14). Between 150 and 800, one of the real
things that really happened to real Europeans was that they were
sicker and died (from smallpox, measles, plague and malaria)
prematurely in greater numbers than they had in previous centuries, or
would in subsequent centuries. The Antonine plague alone (165 C.E.
through 190 C.E.) decimated 8% of the population of Europe (47). Both
Constantine the Great and Alaric died of malaria (50). Between 300
C.E. and 530 C.E., the population of the city of Rome declined by over
90% (53). And so forth. The abundant references to sickness and
miraculous cures in the sources of the period thus provide more than a
window onto a discourse of suffering, or an idiom for expressing
concepts of a sinful body and its hoped-for salvation (<i>salus</i>,
which also means "health"); they actually point to a crucial motor of
epochal change. It is no wonder that almost 10% of the monastic space
in the Plan of St. Gall (with an infirmary, physician's house with
pharmacy and sick ward, house for bleeding, two bath houses and a
medicinal herb garden) is devoted to health care (101).

Reff's <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons</i> makes an important
contribution to the literature on the Christianization of Europe,
opening up possibilities that ought to be verified and pursued by
specialists in the field. Future studies of religious developments
should also be sensitive not only to disease, but also to the effects
of the related phenomenon of climate change, recently highlighted by
Bailey K. Young. [3] <i>Plagues, Priests and Demons</i> also makes a
powerful case for the value of comparative history in particular, and
comparative studies in general. It will not be surprising if some of
the greatest insights of the next generation of scholars come from
academics trained in programs such as Ohio State University's
Department of Comparative Studies.

NOTES

[1] The eventual result of my study of the representations was <i>The
Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and
Saintly Relics, 684- 1090</i> (Toronto, 1995).

[2] For a hilarious, if somewhat cranky, lampooning of certain trends
in the scholarship on late antique mentalities, see Warren Treadgold,
"Taking Sources on their Own Terms and on Ours: Peter Brown's Late
Antiquity" <i>Antiquite Tardive</i> 2 (1994) pp. 153-159.

[3] Bailey K. Young, "Climate and Crisis in Sixth-Century Italy and
Gaul" in <i>The Years without Summer. Tracing A.D. 536 and its
Aftermath</i> ed. Joel D. Gunn (BAR International Series 872; Oxford,
2000), 35-42. The collection is global in scope.

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