The Medieval Church

I will be teaching a five-session class on the Medieval Church at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Raleigh across five Sundays in Lent 2010. This is exciting, as I think it is the obligation of professional (or semi-professional, as the case may be) historians to reach out to the wider public. I hope to get back in to doing this blog and think I'll post materials relating to preparation for the class as I go forward. For now all I have is the class description and a biography to be published in their catalog. There's also a mug shot, which I will not post here.

The Medieval Church:The so-called Medieval Church defies easy description. Spanning roughly a thousand years, it is perhaps best thought of as a succession of "medieval churches," each with its own character but very much rooted in what came before. This class is an introduction to those medieval churches, exploring the paths taken by "the Church" as it faced the challenges wrought upon Western Europe by barbarian invasion, the growth of empires and their dissolution, conflicts with kings, heresy, and the changed intellectual landscape of the high and late Middle Ages. These challenges shaped the institution of the Church, even as it attempted to shape disparate European cultures into a single entity--Christendom. The results reverberate even today.