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Today's lecture is making citizens and Christians at Easter.

I would like to make some brief preliminary remarks.

Professor John Ben Angan, an old friend of mine, is in a justly famous article on the future of medieval church history,

raised the question of how we understand the historical reality that virtually everyone in medieval Europe,

Jews and occasional Muslims accepted, was christened as an infant.

Since medieval Europeans were all routinely baptized as a matter of custom and law, this

practice seems normal even to modern Catholics.

Historians of medieval religion had not, at the time of Professor von Engen's article two decades ago,

and still had not seriously investigated what this ceremony meant for medieval people, or many things it might have meant.

This is a question that needs to be asked because if there really was a medieval Christendom to

which Carlos referred yesterday and as John Van Engen believe it was ultimately

founded on the culture's universally shared right of initiation.

Nevertheless it is well to remember that christening meant vastly different things to those who received it at various times and places in the Middle Ages.

The small family groups that assisted at baptisms of their children in late medieval England, so beautifully described by Amon Duffy,, his classic stripping of the altars,

had a very different experience from the crowds of men, women, and children, baptized and mass,

with their leaders under Charlemagne's subjection of the Saxons in 777.

The former certainly understood the ceremony and its consequences differently from the latter.

The theological implications also differed. The apparently popular belief attacked and reputed by Bishop Jonas of Orleans in the 820s that once baptized, the believer could never go to hell, but

merely faced some perhaps extended period of purgatorial fire after death, can be contrasted

with the common opinion of 13th century Italians, such as Dante, who famously put plenty of

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