A lot has been said about the atonement theology of the theologians, but what of ordinary believers and their church leaders? What, if anything, have they done with "penal substitution" or with "Christus Victor"? How, if at all, have these doctrinal approaches helped ordinary Christians to live more devoted lives or lead good church services? Ben Pugh takes the temperature of the church at various points in its history right up to the present day, noting particular emphases that can be detected in various expressions of personal and corporate faith--whether these be hymns, sermons, magazines, or devotional texts. The book aims not only to describe what the implied atonement theologies of the church have in reality been but also to explore why these have taken the forms that they have. This exploration will shed some fresh light on current debates, building on the findings of the author's earlier work, Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze.

Over 15 years in the making, an unprecedented one-volume reference work. Many of today's students and teachers of literature, lacking a familiarity with the Bible, are largely ignorant of how Biblical tradition has influenced and infused English literature through the centuries. An invaluable research tool. Contains nearly 800 encyclopedic articles written by a distinguished international roster of 190 contributors. Three detailed annotated bibliographies. Cross-references throughout.

Bynum argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, and religious life. As cult object, blood provided a focus of theological debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a central symbol in popular devotion.

A historical investigation of the phenomena of religious conversion from ancient to modern times. This volume explores the subject of religious conversion over broad expanses of time and space, considering cases from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries and from settings across the world. Leading scholars from a variety of historical sub-fields address the theme at a moment when the utility of the concept of conversion is vigorously debated. The historical settings treated here stretch from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century southern India and Andean Peru, from Bohemia to China during the age of the Reformations, from the fifteenth-century Low Countries to seventeenth-century New France and from the nineteenth-century Minnesota borderlands to late colonial Zimbabwe and modern India. The book's broad mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge about particular places and times, and spark new thinking about religious change, cultural appropriations, and interactive emergence across discipline and fields. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, is also published by the University of Rochester Press.

The first extended study of relics of the Holy Blood: portions of the blood of Christ's passion preserved supposedly from the time of the Crucifixion and displayed as objects of wonder and veneration in the churches of medieval Europe. Inspired by the discovery of new evidence relating to the relic deposited by King Henry III at Westminster in 1247, the study proceeds from the particular political and spiritual motives that inspired this gift to a wider consideration of blood relics, their distribution across western Europe, their place in Christian devotion, and the controversies to which they gave rise among theologians. In the process the author advances a new thesis on the role of the sacred in Plantagenet court life as well as exploring various intriguing byways of medieval religion.

This volume deals with the ways in which religious Faith was communicated and adapted during the late medieval period and after, and with the ways in which spirituality, culture, written texts and gender interacted during the same period. Drawing on texts like the Book of Margery Kempe, popular prayers, romances and devotions, well-known devout practices, mystical and visionary writing, and devout representations like the Arma Christi, the book addresses the ways in which these both informed and were informed by attitudes towards Faith and Belief which continue today. Subjects include: the development of religious attitudes; devotion to Christ's blood; the influence of mysticism on literary texts; Chaucer's feminism; Eastern sources; and the transmission of medieval spirituality into the New World.

Examines the origins of the deicide accusation, the claim that the Jews killed Jesus, which has always been the main antisemitic cliché. Although St. Paul, who made the sacrifice of God's son a centerpoint of the new religion, can be regarded as the inventor of Christian antisemitism, he did not level the accusation of deicide against the Jews. Argues that it was the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, who wanted both to placate the Roman rulers by diverting the guilt from them and to dissociate themselves from Jewish nationalism after 70 CE, who accused the Jews. The image of Abraham's sacrifice always lurked behind the Crucifixion in Christian theology; Isaac was regarded as a spiritual ancestor of Christians. Abraham's sacrifice which was thwarted by God posed a theological problem for Christianity: if God prohibited the sacrifice of children, how could He sacrifice His own son? The problem was solved by diverting the accusation of infanticide from God to His people. In the Middle Ages, the notion that the Jews were capable of killing children was transformed into the belief in ritual murder. Scenarios of many blood libels included crucifixion of the victim. In the views of that epoch, the Jews needed to consume Christian blood because it was their only substitute for the Eucharist, essential for salvation. The image of the Jew as a ritual murderer, and at the same time the devil's henchman and a traitorous Judas, was adopted by classical English literature, the most striking example of which is Shakespeare's Shylock.