- The Betrayal of Faith
- Emma Anderson
- Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
- Hardcover 2007
- Christian Art
- Rowena Loverance
- What makes works of art Christian? And what, as such, distinguishes them from other works? These are the questions at the center of this book, which is at once a sumptuously illustrated survey of Christian art across space and time and a probing study of what "Christian art" really means, how it functions, where it arises, and whom it serves.
- Hardcover 2007
- Commentaries, Volume 2, Books III-IV
- Pius II
- Edited by Margaret Meserve
- Edited by Marcello Simonetta
- The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated translation.
- Hardcover 2007
- Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan
- Nam-lin Hur
- During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. These customs gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage, which became a public institution when the shogunate adopted it as an effective means of controlling the populace. In this study, Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this "economy of death."
- Hardcover 2007
- Demons and the Making of the Monk
- David Brakke
- In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.
- Hardcover 2006
- Deus Destroyed
- George Elison
- Paperback 1988
- Divided by Faith
- Benjamin J. Kaplan
- Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
- Hardcover 2007
- Documentary Sources for the History of the Rus' Metropolitanate
- Andrei Pliguzov
- This work is the first collection of source materials on Orthodox Church history published in the United States, and the first to specialize in the medieval doctrine of the Rus' Metropolitanate. The publication presents over 250 documents in chronological order, including many formerly unknown to scholars.
- Hardcover
- Flesh Made Word
- Aviad Kleinberg
- Translated by Jane Marie Todd
- In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful—the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints.Kleinberg argues that the saints’ stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment. By telling and retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were shaping and reshaping Christianity itself.
- Hardcover 2008
- Greetings in the Lord
- AnneMarie Luijendijk
- This is the first book-length study on Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, the site where some of the most important and oldest fragments of early Christian books were unearthed. Bringing the people in these dry papyrus letters and documents back to life, the book reveals how diverse Christians lived in this city of diverse situations.
- Paperback 2008
- A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
- Series edited by Phillippe Ariès
- Series edited by Georges Duby
- Paul Veyne, Volume editor
- Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
- First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world.
- Hardcover 1987 / Paperback 1992
- Imagining the Sacred Past
- Samantha Kahn Herrick
- Investigating the role of religious tradition in the legitimation of power and the establishment of identity, Herrick illuminates the often murky early history of the duchy of Normandy. Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes, shedding light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.
- Hardcover 2007
- Inside the Vatican
- Thomas Reese
- Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with Vatican officials, this book affords a firsthand look at the people, the politics, and the organization behind the institution. Throughout, revealing and colorful anecdotes from church history and the present day bring the unique culture of the Vatican to life.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Late Antiquity
- Peter Brown
- Paperback 1998
- The Le Mans Forgeries
- Walter A. Goffart
- The episcopal biographies, saints' lives, charters, and poems known collectively as the "Le Mans forgeries" are an intricate puzzle that has occupied critics of medieval sources ever since the seventeenth century. On the basis of extensive manuscript study, Goffart disentangles the order of composition and authoritatively pronounces on the authenticity of the eighty-four Le Mans charters. Most of all, he insists that the forgeries are an essay on church property and its law.
- Hardcover 1966
- The Maze and the Warrior
- Craig Wright
- Craig Wright explores the complex symbolism of the labyrinth in architecture, religious thought, music, and dance from the Middle Ages to the present.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004
- The Newman Brothers
- William Robbins
- The mid-nineteenth century was a period of extraordinary intellectual excitement and tension and nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in the divergent careers of Cardinal Newman and his brother Francis. Both were men of considerable mental powers and high moral purpose. They shared a devotion to the search for religious truth and spiritual values, yet their intellectual development drove them further and further apart until they came to represent the two opposing philosophical positions of their age. Professor Robbins' study of the brothers reveals in a new and striking way the master currents of the period which carried these symbolical figures in such different directions.
- Hardcover 1966
- On Religious Liberty
- James Calvin Davis
- Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
- Paperback 2008 / Hardcover 2008
- The Peculiar Life of Sundays
- Stephen Miller
- From Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Miller explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath.
- Hardcover 2008
- Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church
- Andrea Sterk
- Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development.
- Hardcover 2004
- Trent and All That
- John W. O'Malley
- John O'Malley works out a remarkable guide to the intellectual and historical developments behind the concepts of Catholic reform, the Counter Reformation, and, in his felicitous term, Early Modern Catholicism. The result is the single best overview of scholarship on Catholicism in early modern Europe, delivered in a pithy, entertaining style.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- The Virgin and the Bride
- Kate Cooper
- During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with--indeed, how it abetted--social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's lively book.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999
- Women and Faith
- Edited by Lucetta Scaraffia
- Edited by Gabriella Zarri
- Translated by Keith Botsford
- Feminist thought has wrestled with the question of whether religion has been principally responsible for the oppression of women or instead has provided access to culture, public life, and--sometimes--power. This study of Italian women and Catholicism from the fourth through the twentieth century reflects this conflict and the tension between the masculine character of divinity in the Catholic Church and the potential for equality in the gospels and early writings ("neither male nor female, but one in Jesus").
- Hardcover 1999