This ambitious book discusses the attitudes that “the Churches” (almost always identified with the pre-reform Catholic Church) had vis à vis slaves and slavery from the New Testament era to early modern times. In the introduction, Sommar warns that the lack of records about the social practices of slavery forces her study to focus on church norms regarding its unfree dependents. Her statement, however, is only partially true: Dozens of studies, particularly of the medieval period, investigated the social and legal practices of ecclesiastical unfree people in many parts of Europe, Italy, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Germany. Unfortunately, this volume ignores these sources almost entirely, making use almost exclusively of an English-written historiography with a few exceptions in German. This approach is regrettable for a study concerning European continental areas about which copious discussions and valuable source materials are available.
Chapter 2 discusses the way in which the New...