Read about Gregory the Great, Boniface, Charlemagne, Constantine, Methodius, Vladimir, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Sienna, John Wyclif and John Hus.

Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages is a collection of essays presented to John Taylor, former Life Fellow and medieval scholar at the University of Leeds. The essays in the volume have two clear foci, also those of John Taylor's own work: the study of history-writing in the middle ages and the late medieval church. With contributions key scholars on topics such as the hagiography of Saint-Wandrille, Swein Forkbeard and the historians, personal seals in 13th-century England, women in the Plumpton Correspondence and medievalism in counter-reformation Sicily, this volume is a rich and varied collection of medieval scholarship and a fitting tribute to Taylor's work from his friends and colleagues.

An engaging history of royal and imperial families and dynastic power, enriched by a body of surprising and memorable source material.

Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.

The roles of popes, saints, and crusaders were inextricably intertwined in the Middle Ages: papal administration was fundamental in the making and promulgating of new saints and in financing crusades, while crusaders used saints as propaganda to back up the authority of popes, and even occasionally ended up being sanctified themselves. Yet, current scholarship rarely treats these three components of medieval faith together. This book remedies that by bringing together scholars to consider the links among the three and the ways that understanding them can help us build a more complete picture of the working of the church and Christianity in the Middle Ages.

An engaging, richly illustrated account of parish churches and churchgoers in England, from the Anglo-Saxons to the mid-sixteenth century Parish churches were at the heart of English religious and social life in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. In this comprehensive study, Nicholas Orme shows how they came into existence, who staffed them, and how their buildings were used. He explains who went to church, who did not attend, how people behaved there, and how they--not merely the clergy--affected how worship was staged. The book provides an accessible account of what happened in the daily and weekly services, and how churches marked the seasons of Christmas, Lent, Easter, and summer. It describes how they celebrated the great events of life: birth, coming of age, and marriage, and gave comfort in sickness and death. A final chapter covers the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and shows how, alongside its changes, much that went on in parish churches remained as before.

In the summer of 1996 the first international conference was held on the medieval chronicle, a genre which until then had received but scant attention from historians or specialists in literary history or art history. There are several reasons why the chronicle is particularly suited as the topic of an international conference. In the first place there is its ubiquity: all over Europe and throughout the Middle Ages chronicles were written, both in Latin and in the vernacular, and not only in Europe but also in the countries neighbouring on it, like those of the Arabic world. Secondly, all chronicles raise such questions as by whom, for whom, or for what purpose were they written, how do they reconstruct the past, what determined the choice of verse or prose, or what kind of literary influences are discernable in them. Finally, many chronicles have been beautifully illuminated, and the relation between text and image leads to a wholly different set of questions. It is the aim of the present volume to provide a representative survey of the on-going research in the field of chronicle studies, illustrated by examples from specific chronicles from a wide variety of countries, periods and cultural backgrounds.

Read about the reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries who changed the Christian church. Look deeper into issues such as the Scientific Revolution, wars of religion, the Puritans, and the settling of the Americas.

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century crusading ideology in practice. Step by step, it has become one of the most widely read and acknowledged frontier crusading and missionary chronicles. Henry's chronicle offers many opportunities to test and broaden the new approaches and key concepts brought along by recent developments in medieval studies, including the new pluralist definition of crusading and the relationship between the peripheries and core areas of Europe. While recent years have produced a significant amount of new research into Henry of Livonia, much of it has been limited to particular historical traditions and languages. A key objective of this book, therefore, is to synthesise the current state of research for the international scholarly audience. The volume provides a multi-sided and multi-disciplinary companion to the chronicle, and is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Representations,' brings into focus the imaginary sphere of the chronicle - the various images brought into existence by the amalgamation of crusading and missionary ideology and the frontier experience. This is followed by studies on 'Practices,' which examines the chronicle's reflections of the diplomatic, religious, and military practices of the christianisation and colonisation processes in medieval Livonia. The volume concludes with a section on the 'Appropriations,' which maps the reception history of the chronicle: the dynamics of the medieval, early modern and modern national uses and abuses of the text.