Carolyn Walker Bynum is a very well regarded historian of medieval ideas. (Many will remember her famous essay "Christ as Mother".) In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, she has high praise for The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages by Robert Bartlett, a study of the shifting boundaries between the two from 1000 to 1400 that avoids the two common tendencies to explain medieval beliefs away or to emphasize their outlandishness and the credulity of those who held them. "Both of these tendencies," she writes, "can interfere with scholarship, however, because both deprive the past of its full complexity and hence its full power to help us understand how beliefs and events emerge, then as now.... Throughout these essays, Bartlett is comfortable with the ambiguities and contradictions that shape the ideas and practices of real people, but which scholars often deny in an urge to tidy up the past. " Towards the end of her review, she has this:

It is on page 106 that Bartlett asks the fundamental question which all this fascinatingly discordant material urgently suggests: What do "we" do about beliefs "we" do not share? To this, Bartletts exposition gives at least a negative answer: what we do not do is dismiss them as mistakes or delusions, reduce them to psychological aberrations, or giggle at them as objects of amusement. There is, however, a fuller and more positive answer: we should try to see how such beliefs arose and adapted in their changing historical context, which needs they met and functions they served, which basic emotional, spiritual and political quandaries and paradoxes they evoked and addressed. We should do this because, if we can understand the many views of past times in all their complexity and this includes taking account of their real differences from our own views, including the implausible ones we can perhaps understand the way in which the ideas not just of intellectuals but of ordinary people arise and change and also refuse to change.

And she adds, with the modesty of a true historian: "This is fiendishly difficult to do."