Church and Culture in the Middle Ages (350–814)

Endorsement

Praise for Church and Culture in the Middle Ages

“Herbert Butterfield, in his crucial work of 1931 entitled The Whig Interpretation of History, showed that most contemporary historical studies in his day were crippled by a narrow, axiomatic—and one could easily even say ‘pre-woke’—ideological starting point. This prevented scholars from coming to grips both with the real depth of the treasures as well as the actual as opposed to invented problems of the entire non-liberal past. Butterfield’s book was a powerful aid to improving historical writing to such a degree that it is much more likely in our time than in his own to encounter accurate treatment, even on the part of secular-minded academics, of many targets of the closed, liberal, Whiggish mind, the Catholic heritage chief among them.

Gustav Schnürer’s Church and Culture in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1924, illustrates exactly the kind of historical work that insightful critics like Butterfield hoped to see blossom in the Anglo-Saxon world—because this German scholar studied with ‘ears to hear and eyes to see.’ He heard what medieval men themselves said was important to life and looked at what they accomplished in consequence. And what this meant is that his non-ideological researcher’s skill enabled him clearly to outline for us the electrifying effect of the Catholic Faith and the Mystical Body of Christ on the great breadth of human spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and socio-political achievement. Everyone can gain from diving into the labor of this continental harbinger of the work done later in the English-speaking world by men like Christopher Dawson, whose truly open minds, to paraphrase Chesterton, always ‘bite down on something solid.’”

— Dr. John Rao

D. Phil., Oxford; Emeritus Professor of European History at St. John’s University, New York; Director of the Roman Forum; former Chairman of Una Voce America