‘A page-turner’ The Spectator

*A major new reinterpretation of Christendom, by one of our foremost medieval historians*

In the fourth century AD, a new faith exploded out of Palestine. Overwhelming the paganism of Rome, and converting the Emperor Constantine in the process, it resoundingly defeated a host of other rivals. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But, as Peter Heather shows in this compelling new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom’s rise to Europe-wide dominance.

In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Peter Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both so-called ‘heresies’ and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom’s chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention and astounding willingness to mobilize well-directed force.

Christendom’s achievement was not, or not only, to define official Christianity, but – from its scholars and its lawyers, to its provincial officials and missionaries in far-flung corners of the continent – to transform it into an institution that wielded effective religious authority across nearly all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. This is its extraordinary story.

‘Sweeping and engaging history … a non-triumphalist history of the triumph of Christianity, and all the more powerful for it’ Financial Times

This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years. A monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America – all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club.

This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel’s unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been.

In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript ‘at a bookseller’s in a back alley’. This was his reaction: ‘The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold – as many of them were – cannot be told.’ The members of de Hamel’s club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime’s experience.

‘A unique contribution to English history’ Hunter Davies

‘A delightful, refreshingly written book, attentive to social detail and telling the only story that matters – history’ Simon Jenkins

‘A wonderful book’ Margaret Drabble

‘A completely fresh perspective on the Lakes and Lake Poets… I hugely enjoyed it’ Andrew Marr

Bounded by the peaks of Scafell, Skiddaw and Helvellyn, and embracing such well-known landmarks as Borrowdale, Derwentwater and Keswick, it lies within the heart of the Lake Poets’ landscape and its rugged terrain excites passion in all those who know it.

The Parish also boasts a remarkable history. Its 90 square miles were governed, from medieval times, by eighteen annually chosen ‘customary tenants’; ancestors of the people who later prompted Wordsworth’s portrayal of the area as ‘a perfect Republic of Shepherds and agriculturalists’. His fellow poet Robert Southey lived within the Parish for forty years, was an active parishioner and rests in St Kentigern’s churchyard. Here he is given his rightful position as a Lake Poet. In the nineteenth century, the Victorian state killed off the old parish system, sweeping away the egalitarian rule of the Eighteen Men. But a degree of redemption was at hand. Canon Rawnsley, vicar of Crosthwaite from 1883, pledged to defend the Lake District for future generations. So the Parish was at the heart of the creation of the National Trust and blazed a trail for a wider movement to preserve the English landscape.

Writing with a historian’s rigour  and bearing aloft the banner of the Lake District statesmen, Philippa Harrison has produced a magisterial and fascinating record of a parish with a unique social, cultural and aesthetic resonance in English history.

Yet for Richard Morris, post-war parsonages were the happy backdrop of his childhood. In Evensong he searches for what it was that drew his father and hundreds like him towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945. Along the way we meet all kinds of people – archbishops, chaplains, campaigners, bell-ringers, bureaucrats, archaeologists, gravediggers, architects, scroungers – and follow some of them to dark places.

Part personal odyssey, part lyrical history, Evensong asks what churches stand for and what they can tell us; it explores why Anglicanism has often been fractious, and why it has become so diffuse. Spanning over two thousand years, it draws on new discoveries, reflects on the current state of the Church in England and ends amid the messy legacies of colonialism and empire.

The Italian Renaissance shaped Western culture – but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile, but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We revere Leonardo da Vinci for his art, but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We visit Florence to see Michelangelo’s David, but hear nothing of the massacre that forced the republic’s surrender. In fact, many of the Renaissance’s most celebrated artists and thinkers emerged not during the celebrated ‘rebirth’ of the fifteenth century but amidst the death and destruction of the sixteenth century.

The Beauty and the Terror is an enrapturing narrative which includes the forgotten women writers, Jewish merchants, mercenaries, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day. Brimming with life, it takes us closer than ever before to the reality of this astonishing era, and its meaning for today.

‘Terrifying and fascinating’ Sunday Times

‘Enlightening…exactly the alternative history you might wish for’ Daily Telegraph

The illegal underground movement of Protestant separatists from Elizabeth I’s Church of England is a story of subterfuge and danger, arrests and interrogations, prison and executions. It starts with Queen Mary’s attempts to burn Protestantism out of England, which created a Protestant underground. Later, when Elizabeth’s Protestant reformation didn’t go far enough, radicals recreated that underground, meeting illegally throughout England, facing prison and death for their crimes. They went into exile in the Netherlands, where they lived in poverty – and finally the New World.

Stephen Tomkins tells this fascinating story – one that is rarely told as an important piece of English, as well as American, history – that is full of contemporary relevance: religious violence, the threat to national security, freedom of religion and tolerance of dangerous opinions.

This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the untold story of how the Mayflower came to be launched.

‘A riveting story … impeccably researched history … engaging and entertaining, this book serves as reminder of the importance of upholding religious freedom in our current age.’ – Tim Farron MP

The Bible is the central book of Western culture. For the two faiths which hold it sacred, it is the bedrock of their religion, a singular authority on what to believe and how to live. For non-believers too, it has a commanding status: it is one of the great works of world literature, woven to an unparalleled degree into our language and thought.

This book tells the story of the Bible, explaining how it came to be constructed and how it has been understood, from its remote beginnings down to the present. John Barton describes how the narratives, laws, proverbs, prophecies, poems and letters which comprise the Bible were written and when, what we know – and what we cannot know – about their authors and what they might have meant, as well as how these extraordinarily disparate writings relate to each other. His incisive readings shed new light on even the most familiar passages, exposing not only the sources and traditions behind them, but also the busy hands of the scribes and editors who assembled and reshaped them. Untangling the process by which some texts which were regarded as holy, became canonical and were included, and others didn’t, Barton demonstrates that the Bible is not the fixed text it is often perceived to be, but the result of a long and intriguing evolution.

Tracing its dissemination, translation and interpretation in Judaism and Christianity from Antiquity to the rise of modern biblical scholarship, Barton elucidates how meaning has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it. Part of the book’s originality is to illuminate the gap between religion and scripture, the ways in which neither maps exactly onto the other, and how religious thinkers from Augustine to Luther and Spinoza have reckoned with this. Barton shows that if we are to regard the Bible as ‘authoritative’, it cannot be as believers have so often done in the past.

Meeting believers and non-believers, architects and archaeologists, the cleaner who dusts the monuments and the mason who judges stone by its taste, we delve deep into the private lives and the uncertain future of these ever-voyaging Ships of Heaven.

‘Somerville paints word pictures of exquisite quality’
Church Times