The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Thomas E. Woods Jr. · 256 pages

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

Karen Armstrong · 476 pages

"Jerusalem has been venerated for centuries as a Holy City by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. How this came to be and what it means both to the people of Jerusalem and to millions around the world is now richly told by the author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed A History of God.". "In every major religion, a "holy place" has helped men and women define their own place, indeed their own im

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther

Roland H. Bainton

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History

James Carroll · 768 pages

"In a book that is sure to spark heated debate, the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our cul

The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity

Peter R.L. Brown · 204 pages

Actes and monuments

John Foxe · 589 pages

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch · 1,161 pages

Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the fir

The Devils of Loudun

Aldous Huxley · 374 pages

In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

Eamon Duffy · 654 pages

This important and provocative book offers a fundamental challenge to much that has been written about the pre-Reformation church. Eamon Duffy recreates fifteenth-century English lay people's experience of religion, revealing the richness and complexity of the Catholicism by which men and women structured their experience of the world and their hopes within and beyond it. He then tells the powerf

The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam

Bernard Lewis · 176 pages

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy

John Julius Norwich · 536 pages

A comprehensive, rollicking, and timely history of the papacy.

The Reformation

Will Durant · 1,025 pages

Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Bede · 358 pages

The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries

Carlo Ginzburg · 216 pages

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

John Boswell · 436 pages

From back cover: Boswell's highly acclaimed study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Christian West challenges received opinion and our own preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members, among whom were priests, bishops and even canonized saints. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consul

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

Maria Rosa Menocal · 315 pages

A brilliant and fascinating portrait of medieval Spain explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance. of photos. 3 maps.

The Malleus Maleficarum

Heinrich Kramer, Jakob Sprenger · 278 pages

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

Norman Cohn · 414 pages

The end of the millennium has always held the world in fear of earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world. At the dawn of the 21st millennium the world is still experiencing these anxieties, as seen by the onslaught of fantasies of renewal, doomsday predictions, and New Age prophecies. This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe betwe

God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

Rodney Stark

The Borgias: The Hidden History

G.J. Meyer · 478 pages

Sweeping aside the gossip, slander, and distortion that have shrouded the Borgias for centuries, G. J. Meyer offers an unprecedented portrait of the infamous Renaissance family and their storied milieu. They burst out of obscurity in Spain to capture the great prize of the papacy, not once but twice. Throughout a tumultuous half-century--as popes, statesmen, warriors, lovers, and breathtakingly am

The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE

Simon Schama · 512 pages

Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past

Firas Alkhateeb · 217 pages

"Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social, and political forces in history. Over the last 1400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France, to East Africa to South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists, and theologians, n

The Real Middle-Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages

Brian Bates · 320 pages

Tolkien readily admitted that the concept of Middle-earth was not his own invention. An Old English term for the Dark Age world, it was always assumed that the importance of magic in this world existed only in Tolkien's works; now Professor Brian Bates reveals the vivid truth about this historical culture. Behind the stories we know of Dark Age king and queens, warriors and battles, lies the hidde

The Templars: History & Myth

Michael Haag · 368 pages