In the Shadow of Death
Saint Boniface and the Conversion of Hessia, 721-54
By (author) John-Henry Clay
An award-winning interdisciplinary study of the Anglo-Saxon mission of St Boniface to Hessia in the eighth century.
In the year 721, the Anglo-Saxon missionary St Boniface came with his followers to Hessia, a small but turbulent province on the borders of the expanding Frankish kingdom. This book is the first dedicated interdisciplinary study of Boniface’s thirty-three-year mission among the Hessians. The author relates the historical sources to the rich archaeological heritage of the region in order to describe the political and cultural context of the mission and its relationship to long-term Frankish interests in the Saxon borderlands. Thanks to the survival of many letters between the missionary community and its supporters, it is also possible to examine a symbolic literary discourse that portrayed the missionaries as heroic exiles who chose to suffer torments in a distant land for the sake of Christ. Finally, fresh evidence drawn from topography and place names is used to argue for the existence of an expansive pre-Christian sacred landscape that was one of the major obstacles faced by Boniface and his followers. The result is an innovative study that brings history and archaeology into communication with the landscape, both real and imagined, in order to reconstruct a crucial moment in the conversion of Europe in all its complexity, ambiguity, and drama. Awarded the Josef Leinweber Prize 2009 by the Fulda Faculty of Theology.
- By (author) John-Henry Clay
Other Titles in this Series
Between Personal and Institutional Religion
Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity
Volume 15
Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Studies from Western Europe and North Africa
Volume 44
The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World
Converting the Isles I
Volume 19
Writing in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem
Inscription and Graffiti in a Multilingual and Multigraphic Perspective
Volume 45
Historiography and Identity VI
Competing Narratives of the Past in Central and Eastern Europe, c. 1200 -c. 1600
Volume 32
D’Orient en Occident
Les recueils de fables enchassees avant les Mille et une Nuits de Galland (Barlaam et Josaphat, Calila et Dimna, Disciplina clericalis, Roman des Sept Sages)
Volume 16
Incubation in Early Byzantium
The Formation of Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections
Volume 41
Transforming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond
Converting the Isles II
Volume 23
Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France
Essays in Honour of Elizabeth A. R. Brown
Volume 34
Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella
Ninth-Century Commentary Traditions on 'De nuptiis' in Context
Volume 12
Liturgy and Sequences of the Sainte-Chapelle
Music, Relics, and Sacral Kingship in Thirteenth-Century France
Volume 35
Les transferts culturels dans les mondes normands medievaux (VIIIe-XIIe siecle)
objets, acteurs et passeurs
Volume 36
Writing ‘True Stories’
Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East
Volume 9
From Sun-Day to the Lord’s Day
The Cultural History of Sunday in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Volume 39
Motions of Late Antiquity
Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society in Honour of Peter Brown
Volume 20
Historiography and Identity V
The Emergence of New Peoples and Polities in Europe, 1000-1300
Volume 31
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