church history

Women Leaders in Early Christianity

Saint Paul’s letters show women playing leading roles in the earliest Christian communities. Yet, by the fourth century, women’s ministry was very limited. Why?

The Fadden More Psalter: The Discovery & Conservation of a Medieval Treasure

The remains of an illuminated manuscript from the early medieval period, along with its leather cover, were discovered by chance during turf-cutting operations. The find made international headlines and today represents one of the National Museum of Ireland’s top ten treasures.

Art & Worship in the Insular World; Papers in Honour of Elizabeth Coatsworth

The book examines the lived experience of worship in early medieval England and Ireland, ranging from public experience of church and stone sculptures, to monastic life, to personal contemplation of, and meditation on, manuscript illuminations and other devotional objects.

The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual & Religious History of Late Medieval & Reformation Europe

The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages.

The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, & the Rise of the Hospital (2019)

In The Medieval Economy of Salvation, Adam J. Davis shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses.

Medieval Cantors & their Craft: Music, Liturgy & the Shaping of History, 800-1500

This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different ways in which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across the Middle Ages. Its essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records

Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches

Here are strange medieval beasts, knights battling unseen dragons, ships sailing across lime-washed oceans and demons who stalk the walls. Latin prayers for the dead jostle with medieval curses, builders’ accounts and slanderous comments concerning a long-dead archdeacon.

Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

Death has never looked so beautiful. An intriguing visual history of the veneration in European churches and monasteries of bejeweled and decorated skeletons.

Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe

Relics were everywhere in medieval society. Saintly morsels such as bones, hair, teeth, blood, milk, and clothes, and items like the Crown of Thorns, coveted by Louis IX of France, were thought to bring the believer closer to the saint, who might intercede with God on his or her behalf. In the first comprehensive history in English of the rise of relic cults, Charles Freeman takes readers on a vivid, fast-paced journey from Constantinople to the northern Isles of Scotland over the course of a millennium.

Orosius: Seven Books of History against the Pagans

Orosius's History, which begins with the creation and continues to his own day, was an immensely popular and standard work of reference on antiquity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.

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