More David Petts

I've finished a close reading of the short book by the archaeologist David Petts: Pagan and Christian, Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe. I had to grind my mental gears to accustom myself to the archaeological mode of writing, but I do like his conclusions. He notes that conversion to Christianity in the 6th and 7th centuries was not a clear cut process, adhering to 'book' Christianity. Mostly he focuses on Anglo-Saxon England in the early period of the spread of Christianity, but covers digs and evidence from many parts of western Europe in these early years of missionary activity.

I read this book because of debate over Christian missions in North America, primarily in the region now called Canada, in a course I teach.  The residential schools are also a popular focus of student attention. It occurred to me that I don't know how many of the children forced into these schools were already Christian. Another area of debate that arises regularly in this course is that slippery term syncretism. Just how Christian were those baptized by members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society, not to mention other Christian missionaries. This arose from a paper I gave a long time ago at what used to be called the Learned Societies Conference, now the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also a central focus of David Petts's look at early medieval Europe and conversion. 

I was working at the time for an ethnohistorian from the anthropological side, Mary Black Rogers. She was completing a study of the Weagamow area begun by her late husband Edward S. Rogers, who had been Curator of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum and one of the earliest ethnohistorians.  Mary allowed me to dig deeply into the evidence and studies amassed between 1958 and 1974. I focussed on a Cree (or perhaps Orkney-Cree) Anglican priest at Big Trout Lake who left a large body of records on his ministry in the Severn river area, including Weagamow. My paper found that this apparently fully converted  native person, allowed a fair degree of elasticity in practice that a later Euro-Canadian priest assigned there found dubious. 

Without going deeply into the evidence here, baptisms were eagerly followed by native peoples still living a mostly traditional lifestyle, but Christian burials were rare. More interestingly were marriages, which mostly followed Christian theology and Church of England rites. I say mostly, because I found a few instances of this Cree priest marrying men who had more than one wife 'in the custom of the country' (a phrase found frequently in the records of the Hudson's Bay Company posts). There were also a very small number of apparent marriages in the church that were according to Christian theology,  bigamous. This is difficult to ascertain clearly because of the multitude of names that Oji-Cree peoples ordinarily used. Ed and Mary had spent a large amount of their time sorting out names so I am moderately convinced that marriage customs continued to follow indigenous cultural norms while employing Church of England rites. 

Now, the Petts book. His study of early medieval Europe and the case studies he uses from Anglo-Saxon England note that burials only gradually became matters for the Christian church. Even Christian sources don't focus on burial as a religious act often in the early mediaeval period. Gradually archaeology has found Christian goods in burials, but this is not a Christian practice in 'church' terms. Christian burials theologically speaking do not include burial with other objects. Yet burial with objects is common in this period where these burials are definitely Christian. This suggests a mingling of cultural norms carried forward from pagan practices into early Christianity. In other words, what we call syncretism. 

For my teaching purposes and for my own curiosity, the seemingly partial conversion of Oji-Cree peoples in the Severn River region has a strong mate in early Christian Anglo-Saxon England as well as in much of western Europe. David Petts spends a part of his book discussing the differences found in historical writing concerning Christian missionary work in Europe and the evidence of grave goods. His plea is to use both kinds of evidence and not to judge this issue based only on church norms. Rather, the growth of Christianity involved the maintenance of pre-Christian practices within a new Christian context and not the complete abandonment of former societal practices along with conversion.