This book investigates how the practice of keeping a light burning in churches was established in the early Middle Ages. It asks what the material consequences of implementing the practice were and why it ceased at the end of the Middle Ages.

Introduction1 Beginnings2 Consolidation of provision: elite practice3 Light and power: the ‘Carolingian moment’4 Lighting, lords and peasants in post-Carolingian Europe5 Lights and social formation in the central Middle Ages6 Lights in the later Middle Ages: from devotion to destructionConclusionsIndex

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. This unique study investigates the material and social consequences of maintaining such ‘eternal lights’.Never before has the subject been treated as important to the political economy or explored over the whole of the medieval period. The cost of maintaining the lights meant that only the elite could afford to do so, with peasants being organised to provide funds. Later, as society became wealthier, a wider range of people became providers and organised themselves into guilds or confraternities in support of the church and with the particular aim of commemorating their members. Power over the lights, and over individual churches, shifted to these organisations, and when belief in the efficacy of burning lights was challenged in the Reformation, it was such people who were capable of bringing the practice of burning eternal lights to a sudden and sometimes violent end.The study concludes that the practice of keeping a flame on the altar did indeed have important material and cultural consequences. Because it examines the relation between belief and materiality at every turn, the book also serves as a guide to how Western Europe developed from the decline of the Roman Empire to the advent of the Protestant state.

‘[A] meticulously documented survey’.The Journal of Religious History‘Paul Fouracre’s new book is a breath of fresh air. It is a rare historical study that details the “material consequences of belief” in medieval Europe, combining cultural and religious history with a study of medieval economy, agrarian production and trade, and social organisation… To read Fouracre is to witness a master medievalist at work’. English Historical Review'[for] an intellectual historian, this book’s most valuable contribution is that it inspires us to consider the material consequences of the ideas we study, just as it asks economic historians to attend to how ideas and culture may affect production and exchange. Fouracre’s investigation provides a good example of both the potential and the limitations of such an undertaking and provides methodological models. As such, it should be read by everyone interested in the interplay of ideas and social and economic realities.'Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies volume 98, number 1