The Missionary Life Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400-1050

The great missionary figures were crucial to their own time and to posterity. They brought Christian belief and culture to the pagan societies of Dark Age Europe. Not only agents of change, they were also some of Europe's finest historians, leaving a detailed record of the cultures they transformed. The work of St Augustine in England is just one example. Anyone who has read Ian Wood's equally ambitious and compelling surveyThe Missionary Life, will rediscover his ability to bring a remote age to life. The unreliable history of the missionary life is disentangled to produce a uniquely wide-ranging account - giving a sense of the individual experience and collective ethos of the mission, the missionaries' influence on communities and their links to the rest of Christendom.

I. INTRODUCTORY. 1. The Chritianization of Europe, 400 - 1000. 2. From Patrick to Bede. II. THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THEIR LEGACY. 3. Boniface, Mainz and Fulda. 4. Alcunin and Echternach. 5. Utrecht and Münster. 6. Hamburg and Bremen. III. BAVARIANS, SLAVS AND SAXONS. 7. Salzburg and Freising in the Eight Century. 8. Ninth-Century Salzburg. 9. The Latin Legends of Wenceslas. 10. Adalbert of Prague. 11. Bruno of Querfurt. IV. CONCLUSION. The Missionary, The 'Familiar' and the 'Other'.