Review: A History of Pagan Europe

Moving right along in my autumn reading spree, I just finished A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones & Nigel Pennick.

I'm going to start right off with the book's major weakness: Because so many centuries and so much territory was crammed into a relatively short volume, the text had a tendency to degenerate into a list of dates and events. Also, for the same reasons, the book was able to do little more than summarize traditions and pantheons, without giving more depth to cultural context. In addition, some of the illustrations were downright irrelevant. Their captions offered little information, and many of them were never even mentioned in the main body of the text, so they served no purpose.

On the other hand, the book had a few notable strengths. For one thing, this history of paganism was not offered through the lens of a Christian bias, yet doesn't seem to project modern Neo-Pagan concepts on ancient traditions. This is remarkably refreshing. Also, the book addresses more than simply classical Greek and Roman practices and Celtic practices. I found the second half of the book much more interesting than the first half because of its glimpses into societies and traditions that aren't covered ad nauseam elsewhere. Another virtue of the text is that, unlike many Christian-biased histories, it does not portray the displacement of official paganism by official Christianity as a simple clear-cut event; rather, the sometimes lengthy persistence of many folk practices through time is given proper acknowledgement (without being unduly portrayed as the continuance of a formal pagan priesthood through the ages). Lastly, the book illustrates the roots of some not-so-obvious remnants of folk religion in modern culture.

All-in-all, I would recommend this book as a basic overview for readers who have not already engaged in any in-depth study of pre-Christian religion in Europe. If you're pretty grounded in Celtic or classical Greco-Roman culture, the latter half of the book still has value for you as it addresses Germanic and Slavic religion and the interaction of those cultures with the better-known Celtic and Greco-Roman traditions.