Description

Challenging the accepted historical belief that they were mere passive recipients of Christian doctrine and providing insights into the way they would initially have apprehended a very different type of religion in the light of their own beliefs and intuitions, the book also examines the gradual adjustments which the Christian Church itself was forced to make across the period in order to consolidate large-scale conversions.

Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of source material offering new approaches to evidence drawn from writers such as Tacitus, Ambrose, Augustine, Jordanes, as well as the Indiculus Superstitionum, and Pirmin's Scarapsus, it supplements these with material drawn from liturgical texts, hagiography, homilies, ecclesiastical and royal legislation and also from European folklore, interpreted in the light of latest theory to provide an authoritative overview of the period.