The Medieval Ritual Landscape

This monograph reports on the Medieval Ritual Landscape project (MeRit), a collaboration between the University of Reading and the British Museum, funded by the AHRC. It brings novel sources of evidence and methods of analysis to the investigation of medieval lived religion, revealing the deep history of ritual practices performed by ordinary people as part of their everyday lives. The focus is on later medieval England (mid-11th to mid-16th century).

The key source of evidence comprises public finds reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) mainly by metal-detectorists who collaborate with archaeologists in recording evidence that would otherwise be lost. In England and Wales, c. 337,000 medieval finds and their find-spots were reported between 1997 and 2023, when PAS data was uploaded to the MeRit database. Little previous research has been conducted on later medieval PAS finds particularly from the perspective of religious beliefs. This untapped archaeological resource affords a unique opportunity to extend the study of lived religion beyond the home and church and into the medieval landscape, offering glimpses into regional differences and change over time, including the impacts on ritual practice of extended social and economic events such as the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates archaeological, historical and digital humanities analyses and situates the English material in comparative perspective with wider British and Continental practices.

Archaeological perspectives on medieval lived religion provide original new insights in several respects. First, we can identify everyday religious practices that were seldom, if ever, recorded in medieval documents; second, we can extend the understanding of Christian materiality to a broader range of material culture that was accessible to ordinary people; finally, we can add novel spatial and landscape perspectives to complement historical understanding of religious practices that took place within the confines of the church and the home, revealing the agency of people, objects, landscapes and the divine.

The research was designed to address key questions including: in what ways did the material practices of lived religion intersect with gender, family and community? Can we identify distinctive patterns in the biographies of religious objects? How can archaeological finds be used to identify change over time, responses to social and political upheavals, or major transitions in the material practices of lived religion? To what extent did North-western Europe share a common repertoire of medieval religious objects and ritual practices?