James Muldoon

This book is a loosely connected volume of essays on conversion to Western Christianity between about the fifth and the fifteenth century, though with a slight focus on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It's an astonishingly diverse collection, moving from Merovingian Francia to pagan Lithuania to Chinese and Mongolian Nestorians, and makes for interesting and thought-provoking reading. However, there is no strong theme which ties the various essays together, and there's no reason offered—other than, perhaps, the vagaries of who had decided to present at K'zoo on this topic—to suggest why some forms of conversion are included and others not. A concluding chapter would have gone a long way towards pulling things together, especially given that in the introduction, Muldoon states that the book's aim is to unpack "the twelfth century conception of conversion." I came away feeling that I had learned a lot of things, but that was not one of them.… (mais)