FURTHER DISBURDENED, SADLY FOR US:

OBIT: Richard Fletcher: Bestselling historian who scored a hit with his relaxed but acute account of the conversion of Europe (Times of London, 3/11/05)

RICHARD FLETCHER was one of the outstanding talents in English and Spanish medieval scholarship. When he died at his desk he was still engaged on his most ambitious project, a monumental study of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Whether he might have come to be remembered as the Edward Gibbon de nos jours we will never know, but such a comparison was made not long ago by no less an authority than the historian Raymond Carr. It was not a comparison Fletcher himself would have invited. Although he shared his 18th-century predecessor’s disrespect for those in authority, he would have recoiled from the thought of being a cosmopolitan intellectual almost as much as from the fate of being a television history don.

At the heart of his qualities as a man and historian was his unswerving loyalty to his own home and place, that place being not so much the city of York, where he taught for nearly all his career, as the Yorkshire countryside. And he approached the personalities of the past with a wry concern and sense of mischief which owed more to his solitary walks in the country than to the seminar rooms and conferences (which he disliked) of the modern university. [...]

[I]n 1997 there appeared his longest and most remarkable work, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386.

Greeted with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic (“an enthralling book of real genius,” according to the late Archbishop Robert Runcie), in many ways The Conversion of Europe has no real precedent in English historical literature.

In a relaxed, discursive, almost conversational style, Fletcher reflected perceptively on the tortuous course of the most significant theme in the history of Europe, its conversion to Christianity between the age of Constantine the Great and the year (1385) when the coronation of Ladislas as King of Poland made medieval Latin Christendom “at last formally complete”.

For Fletcher the most important result of the outstanding success of The Conversion of Europe was to persuade him to spend the remainder of his life responding to similarly immense challenges. He was appointed to a professorship at York in 1998, but he had become disenchanted with the increasing intrusion of managerial and inquisitorial influences into the university world. In 2001 he retired from the university, thereafter living, in his own words, “disburdened and carefree ”.

As fortune would have it, I'm reading his magisterial book now and it's wonderful. How seldom has a book's mere title managed to dispel an ingrained historical canard? As it indicates, the Dark Ages should more appropriately be called the Enlightenment.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of The Barbarian Conversion (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, NY Times Book Review)

The remoter from Rome, the colder the climate, the harsher the environment, the more present or pressing the threat of barbarism, the more precious seemed the heritage of the ancient Mediterranean world. Almost all invaders of the empire felt its allure and, without necessarily sacrificing their own identities, became self-ascribed to its culture. Seduced by the warm south, Visigoths decorated rood screens with vines. Longhaired northern kings bore consular insignia and appropriated Roman governors' oxcarts. A Russian czar arrogated to himself a title of Constantine's. A Frankish emperor slept in his boots in supposed imitation of Augustus. Anglo-Saxon poets paid tribute to the labors of Roman ''giants.'' By the time the barbarians arrived, Christianity was an inseparable part of the Roman package. As the Roman Empire blended into Christendom, the same sort of magnetism continued to pull in surrounding peoples, who coveted the relative wealth of the Christian world or admired its literacy and technology.

People enmeshed in the process did not always see it like that. Their literature usually presents barbarian conversion as the achievement of saints and heroes, indefatigable missionaries and indefeasible kings who persuaded or compelled their flocks and subjects. One of the delights of Richard Fletcher's dazzling new history, ''The Barbarian Conversion'' -- which ranges from the fourth to the 14th century -- is the pleasure he takes and gives in telling their stories. Who would not follow into baptism a khan like Boris of the Bulgars, who asked the Pope for leave to do war dances? Who would not warm to the shadowy Friar Nicholas, who advised a Lithuanian king against conversion, except on favorable terms? Who could not be touched by the weird hubris of Adalbert of Prague, whose showy humility made him rise at night to polish his household's shoes and die on an impetuous mission in a land where he could not speak the language? Who could resist the seductive or redoubtable women who figure in so many of the stories? The divine dominatrix was often the church's ally, urging or cajoling her men toward the font.

Yet these individuals were playthings of vast, barely personal forces. European paganism was not vanquished by heroes; it disappeared in the slow grinder of cultural processes. The miracles worked by the saints -- storms stilled, live coals handled, prophecies fulfilled, fires extinguished, battlefield fortunes surprisingly reversed -- were all strictly unnecessary. Where there are no saintly stories, conversion ''just happened'' anyway, Fletcher says. [...]

Political frameworks were new. Chiefs became kings and states were created as the word-power and manpower of the church were mobilized on behalf of newly recruited patrons and protectors. The human and vulnerable God of the Christians could not compete in terror with monster gods without the help of strong men. Christianity often brought not peace but a sword. Crusaders wept over potential converts they slew. Erstwhile pagans became the subjects or victims of colonial empires -- herded into mass baptisms, expelled or massacred. ''The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle'' recounts with equal pleasure the immolation of native villages and the piety of forced converts.

The church also became acculturated. To recruit pagan aristocracies, evangelizers early in the period created a companionable, heavy-drinking monasticism of dynastic favoritism, which shamed the church and took centuries to reform. In the heat of the missionary moment Christians coarsened their appeals, tempting converts with promises of worldly rewards and victories. New religious orders were founded with vocations for military or missionary frontiers. Marriage disciplines were relaxed. Where the Latin and Byzantine churches competed for the same converts, barbarians could demand extraordinary liberties: the Moravians got rites in their own language, the Bulgars their own liturgy and patriarch. Converts were granted, in Fletcher's phrase, ''a duty-free cultural allowance'' to carry into Christianity.

After the transfers of culture, politics, technology and biota are counted, is anything spiritual left? These conversions did not happen on roads to Damascus. If they involved a new awareness of transcendence or new affective sensibilities between men, or if they reordered the priorities of ordinary people from survival in this world to salvation in the next, there is not much hint of it in the sources. As Fletcher points out, the emphasis of medieval monitors of conversion is on ''acceptance'' and ''submission'' and ''making people Christian.'' We know too little about what people were converted from to describe the change with confidence. Fletcher is left only with his own ''temperament and judgment'' as the source of his conviction: the foundations of the vibrant Roman Catholicism of late-medieval Europe, he thinks, were laid in the barbarian conversion.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2005 6:03 PM