Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary range of sources that goes well beyond the writings of theologians and canonists to include liturgical texts and practices, the rulings of popes and church councils, saints' lives, chronicles, imaginative literature, and poetry, Faith, Fiction and Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates illuminates the emergence and fortunes of these three controversies and the historical contexts that situate their development. Each debate has its own story line, its own turning points, and its own seminal figures whose positions informed its course. The thinkers involved in each case were, and regarded one another as being, members of the orthodox western Christian communion. Thus, another finding of this book is that Christian orthodoxy in the Middle Ages was able to encompass and accept disagreements both wide and deep on a sacrament seen as fundamental to Christian identity, faith and practice.