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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Non-Christian ‘others’ were crucial to the definition of early medieval Christendom. Many groups certainly found it important to generate a sense of belonging through shared practice, history and ideals. But the history of Christianity was a story of conflict, which from the very beginning saw a community of believers struggling against Jews and ‘pagan’ Romans. At the end, too, Christ warned there would be ‘false prophets’ and tribulations, and John of Patmos saw the ravages of Gog and Magog against the faithful. When many early medieval Christians looked at ‘religious others’, they saw not so much ‘members of religions’, as they did people defined by typologies and narratives designed to express the nature and trajectory of Christendom itself. This has been a recurring theme in scholarship which has sought to understand Christian views of pagans, Muslims and Jews in the period, but the effect and purpose of such rhetoric is not always fully appreciated.
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