FINISHED READING - Going To Church In Medieval England by Nicholas Orme

 

At four hundred and six pages, not including Appendices, and weighing in at 640 grams, this is neither a lightweight nor short book. Certainly compendious, one reviewer called it exhaustive, which I think is code for relentless tedium and beyond. Going to Church In Medieval England covers all the ground it possibly could unearth. It has been a book on my must read list for over a year. Was I so taken up with it I sailed through it till I reached the end, No, I was not. Was I totally bored by it, No I was not. Did I ever want to shout - Oh please get on with it! - Yes, I did' . For 'exhaustive' it most certainly is, exhausting ones interest to a fault.  By the time I reached the end, I could have sworn it was six hundred pages long. 

As a book it flops between being an academic PHD style thesis,where thoroughness of research is much lauded, and a popular accessible history book about ordinary peoples religious lives. In fact the first 1 to 200 pages is packed with juicy little bits of background information about how churches and chapels came to be built, the types of noble patronage, what are Chantries? and how the medieval church gradually formed itself into a functioning whole in the face of famine and plague. It notes the consequent religious fads for various forms of momento mori, like full sized carved cadavers and apocalyptic imagery that arose after these disasters. As humanity tried to imaginatively use its Christian faith to emotionally guide them through this turbulent time.

Orme began to lose me, once he began methodically going through the minute details of all the rituals and services from the daily, to the weekly, to the seasonal and the yearly, and those that marked the life cycle from birth to death. He finally concludes with interesting chapters on how the Reformation unfolded in local parish churches, how forms of worship did or did not change. One senses that the Reformation was more of a cataclysmic upset, that even Mary's attempt to put back all the religious furniture of Catholic orthodoxy, could not quite fully restore. Medieval English forms of Christian worship and its social structures,were by then too irrevocably transformed.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8