Jette Arneborg and Orri Vésteinsson, ed., Small Churches and Religious Landscapes in the North Atlantic c. 900–1300. The North Atlantic World. Land and Sea as Cultural Space, AD 400–1900, 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2025, 350 pp., 37 b/w and 49 color ill., 12 b/w tables, 27 b/w and 8 color maps

It is not easy to imagine what Western Europe’s church landscape looked like before the unifying waves of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Largely or partly preserved built environments are rare, surviving only in a few regions, such as parts of Italy – including Rome – and in Asturias in northern Spain. This richly illustrated volume brings to light the vestiges of a further “pre-Romanesque” church landscape in a region that has largely remained outside the art-historical canon: the eastern North Atlantic. This vast area encompasses most of the British Isles, western Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and all the islands in between. The cohesion of this region was grounded in maritime networks: the sea rendered the inhabitants of Scotland and Norway, Denmark and Iceland, Ireland, the Faroes, and even Greenland into neighbours – geographically distant yet culturally close. The book, which originated in a session held at the 2016 conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) in Vilnius, identifies the phenomenon of “small churches” as a shared characteristic of the North Atlantic prior to the arrival of the institutionalized Church, with its hierarchical structure of dioceses and parishes. In the absence of large monasteries, as found further south, these small sanctuaries formed the backbone of the Northern ecclesiastical landscape.