Enrico, Beltramini: Desecularizing the Christian Past: Beyond R.A. Markus and the Religious‐Secular Divide. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023; pp. 244.

What do we do as historians of religion?And what assumptions do we bring to our study of religious history?Answering these fundamental questions (and others besides) lies at the heart of Enrico Beltramini's challenging new study.It proceeds from a deceptively straightforward proposition: why do we find it so difficult to understand the thought world of Gregory the Great (pope of Rome, 590-604) to the extent that we can barely comprehend why Latin Christendom should designate him as "the Great" and see him as Doctor of the Church?Beltramini's essential argument is that the thought world of Gregory, with its lack of hard and fast boundaries between the natural and the supernatural and between the mundane and the miraculous, is so alien to our own that we find it difficult to empathise with so much of what the pope tells us in his voluminous writings.The study is broken into two parts.The first, comprising an introduction and chapters 1-3, deals with broad, thematic issues, many of them concerned with Beltramini's insistence that post-Enlightenment secularism has squeezed out the sacramental from historical enquiry.The stakes of the debate are high, in Beltramini's view: "As long as historians fail to recognise this intrinsic limit of secular history in addressing the Christian past, they will never understand the religious past of Europe [sic] as the people of the past understood it" (p.26).He argues that for historical enquiry to succeed in describing the religious experiences and dimensions of past societies, the sacramental element must be restored.The alternatives provided by secular perspectives, he contends, are inherently biased against the religious and the supernatural to the extent that they distort fundamental concepts of the Christian past (pp.94-95).He therefore calls for a reunification of history and theology in the study of Christian premodernity.The author's conceptual approach is influenced by a range of twentieth-century Roman Catholic thinkers such as Henri du Lubac, Jean Danilou, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Yves Congar and others, as well as the impact of works by historians such as Andrew Willard Jones (on thirteenth century France) and Brad S. Gregory (on the impact of the Protestant Reformation) who have sought to restore to view the "sacramental worldview" of pre-modern societies.The second part of the book (chapters 4-7) offers a challenge to notions of "the secular" in late antiquity articulated in various works by Robert A. Markus (1924-2010), particularly his monographs Saeculum: History and Society in the Age of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970) and The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), as well as in related essays and books.A disclaimer: I knew and corresponded with Markus when he was a very senior member (and I a very, very