Conor O’Brien is Fellow in History at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and an Associate Professor in the History Faculty at Oxford University. He is the editor of a journal special issue on ‘The Early Medieval Secular’ in Early Medieval Europe29.1 (2021).
Early medieval people could and did differentiate ‘religion’ from ‘not religion’ when it suited them to do so. These secularizing strategies are no less historically significant for being situational and often fleeting.