"Pilgrimage" by Jonathan Sumption

This spring marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of this little gem by the ever impressive Lord Sumption who has been conspicuously successful - to date - in three distinct careers. An Etonian who apparently showed little promise at school, he went on to read history at Magdalen College, Oxford in the late 1960s and flourished. Elected a fellow he spent the next five years researching medieval history and this wonderful book was the outcome.

It is essentially a history of religious belief in Western Europe in the middle ages reminding us just how extraordinarily superstitious and irrational even pretty intelligent people were before the Reformation and then science started to undermine all the hokum. The worship of relics in the form of supposed body parts, clothing and possessions of saints, was a central part of their belief system, and this created a huge market for tourists visiting holy sites. It is completely fascinating, and as always with Sumption's work, compulsively readable. The following paragraph should, in my view, be required reading for anyone looking to begin studying the middle ages:

"The peculiar intensity of medieval piety had as many causes as it has symptoms. But pre-eminent among them was a view of the natural world as a chaos in which the perpetual intervention of God was the only guiding law. God appeared to control the entire natural world from moment to moment. He was the direct and immediate cause of everything that happened, from the most trivial to the most vital incidents of human life. Indeed it was not until the eighteenth century that men were prepared to concede to nature any power of her own, or to attribute the workings of the natural world to anything other than divine intervention. in these circumstances, men were inclined to feel that their lives were directed by irresistible forces. Since they could not control them, the only remedies available were supplication and the performance of pious acts likely to propitate them."

He went on to become a barrister, QC and celebrated Supreme Court Judge, but always combined his legal practice with writing history, most notably a five volume history of the Hundred Years War, which like this first book is a pleasure to read as well as being meticulously researched.

In retirement Jonathan Sumption has now gone back to the third of the professions he has practiced during his long and illustrious career, namely writing political commentary. A seriously impressive fellow.