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This chapter studies accounts of contemporary paganism circulating in Eastern and Northern Europe from the eleventh century onward. In the mid-thirteenth century, when the Mongols had conquered a vast empire, two Franciscan travellers, John of Piano Carpini and William of Rubruk, were received by the Great Khan and wrote about the life and traditions of a pagan society at first hand. Medieval readers also knew a mass of partly fantastical material, much of it inherited from antiquity, about the remote lands of Asia and their pagan inhabitants. In the mid-fourteenth century, an anonymous writer wove this material together with the reports of genuine travellers into The Book of John Mandeville, a medieval best seller which takes a surprisingly deep and original look at the Problem of Paganism. In addition, this chapter takes a look at Willehalm, a Middle High German poem written c. 1210–20 by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

This chapter turns to the first of the three aspects of the Problem of Paganism — knowledge, virtue, and salvation — which is examined here for the period 1400–1700. It begins by looking at discussions, mainly about ancient Greek and Latin pagans and their writings, in and out of the universities, before going on to see how the Problem was complicated and given special relevance, but not fundamentally changed, by contacts, from 1492 onwards, with large groups of contemporary pagans, in America and then in China. Within roughly four decades from 1492, Europeans came into contact with — and all too rapidly made themselves the rulers of — a vast number of previously unknown pagan peoples, in what was before long recognized to be a new continent in the West.

This introductory chapter states the book's aim to examine the interactions between contemporary Pagan adults and children as they establish, inhabit, and negotiate understandings of childhood, adulthood, and the religious imagination. Although contemporary North American Pagan adults and children frequently emerge from a predominantly middle-class environment, Pagan adults' understandings of the religious and social worlds of childhood, relationships between parents and children, and memories of their own religious childhoods depart from those of mainstream Americans. The book indicates that contemporary American Pagans draw on rich, diverse, mythologized understandings of their religion's history to construct a theoretical understanding of childhood as a realm of wonder, fantasy, and religious wisdom that adults frequently attempt to re-inhabit. In many ways, Pagan adults displace Pagan children from the realm of childhood.