Addressing fundamental questions about the conversion of the West to Christianity between the fourth and eighth centuries, this book explores how and why new religions spread in societies that were previously foreign to them and examines what happens to old gods and traditional beliefs in the process. The spread of Christianity through rural areas in the post-Roman West was marked by confrontation, rejection, and incorporation of alternative beliefs whose resilience stemmed from their connection with the diverse demands of everyday life of peasant communities. The slow process of penetration and spread of the “new religion” in the countryside, with the contradictions that characterized it, can only be fully understood through its integration into the more global process that was underway at the time: that of the development of new relations of power and domination, with the resistance that opposed it. With a theoretical approach, the volume addresses deeper questions about how Christianity developed alongside economic and social processes of change.This book is a compelling resource for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars, as well as any reader interested in the high Middle Ages.
