Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West. Vol. 1: Northern Europe and the Baltic, ed. Radoslaw Kotecki, Jacekt Maciejewski, and Gregory Leighton. Leiden and Boston: Brill Press, 2023, pp. XV, 313, 10 color images.

The study of the religious practices of lay Christians during the early and high Middle Ages suffered from both neglect and significant historiographical blinders up until the latter decades of the twentieth century. In particular, there was considerable scholarly skepticism that lay people participated in the practices and rites, described in Latin by literate clerics, such as regular confession and prayer to the Christian God. One of the common problems identified by scholars was the lack of attention paid in contemporary source materials to the actual participation of lay people in Christian rites. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a number of scholars, including Philippe Contamine and Michael McCormick, began to emphasize the religious practices of fighting men in warfare from late antiquity up through the later medieval period. This approach was fruitful, in large part, because medieval authors devoted enormous attention to military matters of all types, including religious practices.