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The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Socio-historical Approach to Religious Transformation. By JAMES C. RUSSELL. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
The author provides here a fresh perspective on a central phenomenon of early medieval history, the conversion to Christianity of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. Drawing on the principles and methods of the behavioral sciences, above all on the theories of the comparative mythologist Georges Dumezil, Russell develops the thesis that the Western Christian faith was in essential ways transformed through its encounter with the Indo-European folk culture of the barbarian Germans.
Russell notes how early Christianity, as an Eastern mystery religion with a world-rejecting, salvationist orientation to a life to come, offered a vital new hope and spiritual satisfaction to a Roman world whose rootless urban masses had become increasingly alienated from the decadent, indifferent late Roman society around them. But when Christian missionaries sought from the fourth century on to spread this message of hope among Germanic tribal societies beyond the Alps, they found a far less receptive environment. Russell contends that this was primarily because the...