Dante travels through the circles of Hell, guided by Virgil. At the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, Virgil abandons him, leaving him with Beatrice, the woman Dante loved. With Beatrice’s smile, Dante is transported to Paradise, experiencing astral bliss as he soars through the cosmos. But Beatrice must leave him at the approach to the Eternal Fountain: for him to glimpse her smile further would be to incinerate him with its divinity.
The relationship between humanity and divinity lies at the heart of this new history of the Middle Ages. Mark Gregory Pegg’s vignettes of martyrs, theologians, scholastics and secular figures illustrate the development of Christianity in the West after the collapse of the Roman empire, and the making of Latin Christendom.
The period that Pegg covers begins in 203 and ends in 1431 – with two young women, Vibia Perpetua and Jeanne la Pucelle (Joan of Arc). Their commonality is their demise, martyrdom – Perpetua as a Christian and Joan as an accused heretic. Both women believed they were in direct communication with God. Perpetua’s divine visions were so powerful that she embraced her end in the cruel confines of the Roman amphitheatre in Carthage ‘singing, indifferent to her nakedness’, welcoming it as she was gored by a bull before she helped the gladiator ‘slice her throat’. But there is no redemption in Pegg’s account of the western transition from Rome to Christendom. Christians were hunted down and brutally murdered until the reverse happened, when paganism was branded as ‘impious and morally craven’.
A penitential culture that persisted from the 7th century onwards transformed how Christians believed they were judged by God, and Pegg traces the stories of those who lived in a perpetual state of remorse and atonement.
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