to the 2020 edition
One of the few consolations during the Covid-19 lockdown and its aftermath has been the intensification of contacts between historians, and the large number of publications that have become available online. After the few first weeks of shock and anxiety, and for some illness and the desperate care for sick relatives and loved ones, academics have organised themselves into seminar groupings around shared interest and expertise, yet global and all-embracing in their digital reach. Publishers followed with generous offers of access to books and articles to underpin whatever research was still going on during the closure of libraries and archives.
The Institute of Historical Research – the historians’ home and a publisher too – has played its part, with online seminars and enabling activities. Since 2017 new books produced by the IHR and its partner, the University of London Press, have been freely available as open access from their first publication. Now, in response to the lockdown, the Institute is preparing a selection of its earlier print titles for reissue as open access. I was delighted to hear that European Religious Cultures was chosen to be such an offering, as part of the recently created ‘IHR Shorts’ series.
This generous act is in the spirit of the academic gathering in 2007, which took place at the Institute and Queen Mary, University of London, to mark the 80th birthday of Christopher Brooke (1927–2015). Christopher’s scholarship had always dealt with aspects of the religious life, from the monastic to the popular, an enterprise which he maintained even as he served as the most prolific and exacting editor of medieval texts in his generation. So it seemed right to gather scholars whose lives had crossed with his, and who had developed interesting approaches to what we now call the ‘religious cultures’ of the middle ages. In the comments he offered at the end of that day, Christopher noted the exciting novelty, but also the thread of continuity: making the sources speak. Sources meant not only texts, but images, for Christopher always blended his work with archaeology, art history, liturgy and architecture.
When soon after we were approached by the (then) IHR director, Professor David Bates, to consider publishing the papers in a volume, I was delighted that the day we had lived together might be shared. The resulting volume opens with a lecture delivered by Giles Constable, Christopher’s life-long friend. The historiographical story of their lives, the move from the hegemony of ecclesiastical history in the study of religion, to the study of religious culture could not have been more authoritatively delineated. And it is followed by Paul Binski’s reflections on what it takes to understand the buildings and images that medieval people crafted: how are they to be read? Binski’s 2019 Gothic Sculpture is a magisterial fruition of some of the thoughts developed here.
The six shorter articles that follow bring together scholars of different generations and training. A section on the life-cycle of religious men, with papers by Jinty Nelson and Virginia Davis, marked a turn towards taking age seriously and was followed a few years later by the founding of the IHR’s own Life-Cycles seminar. The contribution by Susan Boynton, a historian of music was a sign of the emerging turn towards a new history of liturgy, while William Purkis’s article on monastic spirituality and crusade exemplified the trend towards the study of the crusades as expressions of European culture. John Arnold introduces with helpful clarity the theory and practice of studying medieval emotions, an interest which animates the Centre for the History of the Emotions, founded at QMUL in 2008 – the year this book was published. In her essay Caroline Barron explored St Zita, a saint much loved in London, with a material approach to devotion. Each contribution marked possibility, and so still reads with a certain freshness.
Had the event been planned for 2020, it would have probably contained more discussion of the materiality of religion, perhaps the sounds of medieval religious life. It may have dwelt on questions of religious difference more, and may even have had a global turn to it. I trust – I know – that the pieces collected here, gifts to Christopher and offerings to other scholars of medieval Europe, will delight in 2020 and beyond just as they did when they were first delivered.
Miri Rubin, Cambridge, June 2020