Servants of God, Slaves of the Church: Service as Religious Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe

Lisa Kaaren Bailey examines service and servitude in early medieval Europe at the point where religious language met social reality. Christian writers repeatedly described themselves as servants or slaves of God, yet they lived in societies in which slavery and unfree labour remained tangible institutions. Bailey asks how those two meanings interacted.

Sermons, letters and saints’ lives record queens scrubbing monastic floors as acts of humility, but also enslaved people washing linens, tending lamps and sustaining the daily work of churches without the freedom to refuse. Bailey traces how the same language of service could dignify chosen devotion and obscure coercion. Much of this labour survives only in accounts written by people with greater power, a difficulty she keeps in view when piecing together lives that rarely speak for themselves.