This book offers far more than one might expect from the title. The topic of "pagan survivals, superstitions and popular cultures" is open to a wide range of interpretations. It is a subject area as much of interest to New Age proponents of Wicca as it is to the professional medievalists who constitute the author's intended audience. Studies on medieval topics as varied as rural social relations, holy wells, the benandanti , heresy, pilgrimage, and magic commonly invoke aspects of an "alternative" worldview that can be elusive to the many non-specialists interested in this material. What results is often a m?lange of undigested folklore and recycled chestnuts from the secondary literature, only sporadically grounded in actual medieval sources, that holds the promise of historical validity without actually achieving it. What is needed for more responsible interpretations of this "popular" worldview are systematic explorations of the source material that can be used with equal facility and assurance by specialist and non-specialist alike. Bernadette Filotas has made a valuable contribution to scholarship by offering just that. By systematically mining the pastoral literature of the early Middle Ages, she has produced nothing less than a handbook for the study of ideas and practices included in it that, during the crucially important period of the Christian conversion of Europe, the Church sought to regulate or suppress.
This strategically chosen body of primary material is particularly rich in its "evidence of the aspects of popular religion and culture that the ecclesiastical hierarchy perceived as survivals of paganism and superstitions," and it is Filotas's stated purpose in this book "to provide a systematic inventory of the data found" (p. 1). The scope of the book's coverage is roughly western Europe between ca. 500 and ca. 1000, but the material spills over all boundaries and, more profoundly, has vastly wider implications. As she states in the introduction, "popular culture" has itself left no written legacy. Virtually all the written sources were produced by clerics for their own purposes and are thus often unsympathetic to the peoples, practices and ideas that constitute popular culture. The written sources, in fact, constitute a hegemonic discourse which must be used cautiously to draw out information on "the dominated" rather than "the dominators."
Appropriately, Filotas begins with an Introduction that constitutes a historiography of the study of popular culture and a rationale for her choice of material. This is followed up by a long, methodological first chapter on "Concepts, Contexts and Sources," Initially, she tackles the concepts she is dealing with--paganism, superstitions, pagan survivals and popular culture--which, as she points out, "are controversial, nebulous concepts suspect in the eyes of many modern historians" and steeped in "ethnocentrism and value judgements" (12). Nevertheless, the study of this subject area is still so undeveloped that alternative terminology is as yet unavailable, and so Filotas, while forced to use such loaded terms, explains adequately why and how they are loaded. The word "paganism" is a reductive and pejorative catch-all that arose from an intolerant Christian "ethnocentrism", and a "superstition," of course, is simply a belief not shared or condoned by the person wielding the term. Neither are the concepts of "popular" religion or culture very straightforward: who are "the people," and what is their relation to "the privileged classes"? Filotas seeks to disarm such aggressively confrontational concepts, and in so doing, provides more than just a critical and historiographic prolegomena to her study. Together with the plentiful citations of secondary literature, this constitutes, and can easily be used as, a scholarly guide to this fascinating subject area.
After this lengthy methodological overview, Filotas systematically mines the primary sources for the evidence they offer on "pagan survivals, superstitions and popular cultures." This evidence is presented in seven chapters that constitute a systematic analysis of the material into constituent subjects and themes: "Idolatry, Gods and Supernatural Beings" (Ch. 2); "Nature" (Ch. 3); "Time" (Ch. 4); "Space" (Ch. 5); "Magic--Magicians and Beneficent Magic" (Ch. 6); "Ambivalent and Destructive Magic" (Ch. 7); and "Death" (Ch. 8). There is some amount of overlap among these categories, and others might well have been devised, but the author's choice, together with the book's superb scholarly apparatus, make it quite easy to find topics and information. Each chapter contains subdivisions, and even sub-subdivisions, which facilitate the location of specific thematic material. Most of these components are listed in the Table of Contents, but within the sub-subdivisions, there are further thematic divisions which are not listed. Thus, for example, the first subdivision of "Nature" (Ch. 3) is "The cult of the heavens" (Ch. 3.1), which contains two sub-subdivisions, "Heavenly bodies" (Ch. 3.1.1) and "The heavens and human affairs" (Ch. 3.1.2). Although it is not evident in the Table of Contents, however, each of these sub- subdivisions is further subdivided. Ch. 3.1.1. "Heavenly bodies" contains sections on "The sun," "The moon," and "The firmament." Ch. 3.1.2. "The heavens and human affairs" contains sections on "Priscillianism and the stars," "Horoscopes and astrologers-- nascentia, divinationes temporum, mathematici ," and "The calendar." The Table of Contents would have been a better finding aid if these further subdivisions had been listed. Nevertheless, there is also a very full Index, which accommodates such arcane and obscure searches as "anaphrodisiac," "bread," "crossroad," "dream," "entrails," "fascinatio ," "grain," etc. The Index very usefully includes both English and Latin terminology, both ancient and modern authors, and titles of sources. As full as it is, however, the Index is far from being exhaustive, and I found myself compiling my own "index" entries--on "architects and builders" and "measuring," for example--and occasionally noted significant references that were not included in existing Index entries (e.g. for chalice, stag, well). Some subjects, however, occur so often through the text that an index entry is simply insufficient to deal with them effectively. Thus, even though there is an index entry for "tree," it does not begin to exhaust all references in the book, and the subject is further indicated under more specialized index entries: arbor, arbores; ash; Geismar, oak at; grove; Irminsul; laurel; lucus; nimidas; oak; shrub; silva; twig; woods; etc.
As valuable as the book is for the information drawn from its sources, which is its primary purpose, it also has a lot to offer on the sources themselves. One of the advantages of Filotas's choice of primary material is that it has largely been published in responsibly edited versions that have enabled her to consult a very large number of sources, and the detailed use that she has subjected them to has resulted in new analytical perspectives on pastoral literature. Filotas includes in this category church councils, penitentials, sermons, tracts and letters. For researchers who may be interested more in these sources than in the information Filotas has gleaned from them, the book is very user friendly. Not only are they all included in the Index, but the Bibliography presents them analytically by type. Thus, the church councils she has relied on are all enumerated together, and they are broken down further into Iberian councils, Insular councils, and Gallican, Merovingian and Carolingian councils. The penitentials and sermons are similarly presented by type, and there are sections on canonic collections, capitularies, letters, tracts and minor works. There follows a plentiful selection of secondary sources.
The publisher is also to be congratulated for including the references to primary, and secondary, sources in footnotes, so that one doesn't need to read the book with one finger stuck in the endnote section and, as in those particularly stupid books where the endnote references are abbreviated, another in the bibliography. Here, information and sources can be studied together, as an integral discourse, which is made much richer by the analyses of the sources in the text. For penitentials, for example, Filotas shows that specific practices mentioned in one particular example do not necessarily reflect current, local use, since prohibitions were often copied verbatim from earlier penitentials produced at a considerable chronological and/or geographical distance. What is often more revealing are additions to or deletions from such citations. Filotas also makes useful comparisons between sources, and provides discussions of problematic terms. Throughout the book, in fact, she consistently gives historiographic overviews of the ways that terms have been understood and used, both in the medieval sources and in the modern secondary literature, and in cases where the meaning of a Latin term is ambiguous, or just downright lost, she informs the reader, at the same time providing indications of how the term has been variously translated that constitute solid guidelines for its understanding and for further research.
As useful as the book is, one must bear in mind, as well, the limitations of its scope. The "pagan survivals" with which Filotas deals here are limited to those disapproved of by the church. Such already integrated "pagan" practices as the use of candles, processions and votive offerings are only touched upon when they were, in the Church's eyes, being abused. It was no easy task for the Church to decide, at any time during the Middle Ages, just where and when "popular" practice crossed that fine line between grudging acceptance and outright condemnation. And although in her first chapter Filotas contains a treatment of the "Western European paganisms" whose survivals are at issue here, including prehistoric, Roman, Celtic and Germanic religions, they are not well known in and of themselves. Apart from Roman religions, they are badly documented, and not only are the relations between them still vague, but the early medieval authors of pastoral literature made no effort to understand or differentiate them. Thus, there is scope for more understanding both of the syncretic nature of early Christianity itself and of early non-Christian religious practices in Europe.
As well, as Filotas makes quite clear, pastoral literature constitutes only one among several bodies of evidence for this material. Besides the primary sources she has chosen to investigate, she identifies hagiography, the liturgy, theological works, histories and chronicles, scientific treatises, poetry and legends, as relevant written sources. Archaeology and surviving material culture constitute others, as do the essentially oral traditions of folklore. It is to be hoped that the example Filotas has provided in her treatment of pastoral literature will spark further studies among other sources, not only for the early Middle Ages but for later periods, as well. It remains to be seen what sources might be mined for the later Middle Ages. Between Filotas's territory and the early-modern realm of folklore, many popular ideas and practices appear to "go underground," but only further systematic study of sources will clarify the situation.
Interest in the subject matter of this book is not new. Since the early modern period theologians and folklorists alike have noticed and collected evidence of "pagan survivals, superstitions" and other peculiar aspects of popular culture. Despite this interest, however, the area has remained marginal, only occasionally impinging on the mainstream consciousness of the historical disciplines. But historical writings are like travellers' tales, and as Beryl Smalley once observed: a traveller tends to find what he [or she] is looking for. It is increasingly obvious that more and more medievalists of all kinds are looking, in their explorations of the Middle Ages, for something beyond dominant ideologies and the elites who sought to control the "primary sources." With this book, the growing number of historians of medieval popular culture now have both an excellent resource and a valuable methodological study to further their ends.