I’ve just signed a contract with Reaktion Books to write a new history of the early expansion of Christianity in Europe entitled Strange Christianities: Christianising Europe’s Peoples, 314-1200.

Strange Christianities turns the familiar story of the medieval church’s gradual triumph on its head, focussing on the peoples who adopted Christianity (often on their own terms) rather than on missionaries, kings and popes. The strange and unfamiliar peoples who encountered Christianity between the fourth and twelfth centuries did as much to change the Christian faith as Christianity changed their societies. Mission and conversion were experiences of mutual contact and cultural and spiritual exchange, and they became the crucible in which each European people forged its own distinctive (and at times eccentric) approach to the Christian faith.

Strange Christianities chronicles the development of ‘popular’, deviant, eccentric, syncretic, heretical and unsanctioned forms of Christianity in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, from Ireland to the Caucasus, from the Slavic lands to late Roman Gaul. The book abandons a historical hindsight that views Christian history through the prism of late medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century expressions of the faith, recovering the richer reality of late antique and early medieval Christianity (or more accurately ‘Christianities’) as a diverse ecosystem of belief.