C. S. Watkins’s goal in History and the Supernatural in Medieval England is to “try something new. [My book] deals with one aspect of religious culture, beliefs about the supernatural, in what we might think of as a (very) long twelfth century running from c. 1050 to c. 1215” (3). Watkins’s book is also unusual in that it focuses on chronicles, a source largely underutilized in the study of medieval religion and folklore. One of the strengths of the chronicles from the folklorist’s perspective, however, is that their accounts of events are often grounded in oral tradition. Indeed, as Chris Given-Wilson writes in his Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), chroniclers privileged oral sources, which means that even though the chronicles are usually in Latin, the stories recounted in them sometimes represent an almost direct encounter with medieval oral traditions: many of the accounts found in the chronicles of supernatural or unusual occurrences have, for example, clear parallels in later urban legends.

Watkins’s introduction looks carefully at the chronicles and their study, both in the Middle Ages and in the present. He is critical of earlier work, especially when it too quickly makes large-scale generalizations. As he writes: “Instead I intend to speak about the Christianity or religion of the parishes because this formulation offers more scope for the variety that recent commentators have identified in belief and practice at the local level” (21). While there are, of course, general trends in religion and folk culture, it is nonetheless important to take into account local variation, especially, perhaps, in studies of medieval religion, since there was more variation at the local level than is often allowed. It is also important to account for, as he does, the individual chronicler. Even though we can generalize and say, for instance, that miraculous events, encounters with demons, and the supernatural powers of saints, played an important role in medieval religion, it is clear that the various chroniclers had different levels of belief about the reality and importance of the supernatural and miraculous.

The first two chapters seem to me to be of special importance for the researcher in medieval folk religion and supernatural belief. Watkins’s first chapter, “Thinking about the Supernatural,” examines how the supernatural fits into the medieval worldview. What did it mean for a chronicler’s view of history that he accepted supernatural occurrences as historical events? And what does it mean for modern scholars, who reject such events as part of history, to study these important elements of medieval religion? Watkins carefully explains what theological concerns the medieval authors had as they debated and believed in the role of the miraculous and the supernatural in the everyday world.

His second chapter, “Inventing Pagans,” is an examination of just what medieval authors really wrote about pagans, and what they meant when they wrote it. Most medieval authors had never met pagans because, except in a few regions like Lithuania, paganism was a dead force in the central and later Middle Ages. Yet authors constantly wrote as if paganism was a real fear. As Watkins shows, this was in large part because much of the theological writing that was influential in the Middle Ages came from a period when the encounter with paganism was real, and later writers transferred the references to paganism in these works to the non-Church beliefs and practices they encountered. It is clear, however, that the Church did not exercise close control over the parishes, and that the Christianity practiced among the folk was simply different from that of the official church. In other words, the laity were not pagans: their beliefs and practices, though not a part of the official Church, were nevertheless Christian, and the laity believed themselves to be Christian. Accusing these beliefs and practices of being pagan was, by the central Middle Ages, just a particularly strong way of rebuking them. These accusations are not evidence of the survival of paganism.

The other chapters of Watkins’s book are concerned with describing what people believed: chapter 3 takes up “Prayers, Spells and Saints”; chapter 4, “Special Powers and Magical Arts”; chapter 5, “Imagining the Dead”; and chapter 6, “Thinking with the Supernatural.”

C. S. Watkins’s History and the Supernatural in Medieval England is one of the most important books on medieval folk religion in recent years: it is a must read for anyone working on medieval and early modern folk religion and supernatural belief.

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[Review length: 746 words • Review posted on May 19, 2009]