Servants of God, Slaves of the Church: Service As Religious Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe (Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures)

In Servants of God, Slaves of the Church, Lisa Kaaren Bailey uncovers the surprising intimacy between sacred devotion and coerced labor in early medieval Europe.From queens who scrubbed monastery floors to enslaved women forced into lifelong service, acts of humility and acts of subjugation often looked the same and were interpreted through the same religious lens.Drawing from sermons, letters, miracle stories, and hagiographies, Bailey shows how metaphors of service shaped not only elite piety but also the lived experience of those at the very bottom of the social order. This is a story of lives that were often absent from the historical record: those who lit church lamps, laundered liturgical linens, and sustained Christian worship through their unseen labor.Bailey weaves together theology, cultural history, and feminist historiography to trace how Christian ideas about virtue, sin, and the will both justified unfreedom and offered tools to contest it.Her use of "critical fabulation"