Rob Meens, Dorine van Espelo, Bram van den Hoven van Genderen, Janneke Raaijmakers, Irene van Renswode, and Carine van Rhijn, eds. Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 559.

We have entered the golden age of the English-language Carolingian Festshrift. As the formidable generation of Carolingian historians who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s begins to retire, their many students are honoring them with collections of essays that chart the landscape of the academic field that their teachers labored so diligently to shape. In recent years, Janet Nelson (2008), John Contreni (2013), Thomas F. X. Noble (2014), and Rosamund McKitterick (2018) have each been the recipients of such volumes. In the book under review, the honoree is Mayke de Jong, chair of medieval history at Utrecht University. Her colleagues and students have assembled twenty-five articles about religion and power in the Carolingian world as a testament to the vision and enduring influence of de Jong’s pioneering work in this field. As Rosamund McKitterick explains in her introductory essay, de Jong has always been “an adventurous explorer, ever pushing at the boundaries both of political discourse in relation to political action in a fundamentally religious context” (p. 5) If we take for granted today the close proximity of religion and politics in the early medieval world, it is largely due to the formative scholarship of de Jong.