Research Interests

My research examines the religious and cultural conversions of early medieval Europe through the study of ritual objects and physical landscapes—things and places which communicate identity across time and distance. My research interests include interdisciplinary studies of material religion in late antique and medieval Europe; water and waterscapes in premodern environmental history; conversion and rites of passage in the liturgy; and the history and archaeology of the medieval parish church and stone baptismal fonts. Water and stone have been the primary focal points of my work in the history of medieval materiality and lived lay religion, and I am also developing projects on oil and salt which overlap with the histories of medicine, religion, and food culture.

Monograph

Living Water, Living Stone: A Material History of Baptism in Early Medieval England examines the formation of Christian identities through the ritual and material performances of baptism. Baptism was an essential act of social and religious initiation experienced by the majority of people in Europe, and yet historians have struggled to understand its administration for ordinary lay participants as Europe transitioned from paganism to Christianity. I show how what began as a flexible array of diverse religious practices located in watery environments, Roman-style baptisteries, portable spoons, lead tubs, and wooden buckets, evolved into a ritual standardized in the stone baptismal font, a form which persists to this day. I deploy an interdisciplinary methodology that engages robustly with church archaeology, art history, environmental and landscape history, and religious studies to demonstrate how baptism created localized religious identities for new adult and infant converts. This study transforms our definition of a united Christendom by radically reinterpreting the practice of baptism as a slow process of Christianization in Europe from below.