Beating the Bounds of the Christian

Early medieval Europe lacked both the classical polis and the high medieval parish. No legal or administrative apparatus delimited who belonged to each local church and what area lay under the pastoral care of its clergy. Instead, preachers and congregants employed the Rogation Days and other mandatory rituals as times for community formation and social solidarity, when the local church exhibited itself to itself as a Christian body. Ideally, all Christians processed together, fasting and in penitential garb: an amorphous mass of laity led by their clergy. Early medieval Rogation processions never “beat the bounds” in the physical sense of walking around the limits of a parish. But they did beat the bounds in another sense: they demarcated the borders of the Christian people.