Faculty Contact for Fall Term 2027: Professor Christopher MacEvitt

REL 34: Vikings, Celts, and Saxons: Medieval Christian Imagination of the Pagan Past
This course explores how the inhabitants of the British Isles became Christian, and how they linked their new identities to their previous pre-Christian ones.  The conversion of ‘barbarian’ peoples in northwest Europe between the years 400 and 1000 meant Christianity had to adapt to a different environment than the Roman and Mediterranean one in which the religion developed.  The northern world was outside the Roman Empire, without cities, with different languages, cultures and notions of relations between the human and divine worlds.  This course explores the impact the conversion of Germanic, English, Celtic and Nordic communities had on Christianity, as well as why communities of the northern world voluntarily chose to adopt this new religion. How did these new Christians understand their pagan past? Was it a radical shift? Or did northern Christians seek to integrate their pagan past with their Christian present? We will also be exploring how the pre-Christian past is being reanimated in the context of contemporary nationalisms in Scotland, Ireland, and other North Atlantic areas