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

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

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

Jerusalem: The Biography

Simon Sebag Montefiore · 672 pages

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and

Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Victoria Finlay · 448 pages

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

Simon Schama · 512 pages

Byzantium: The Early Centuries

John Julius Norwich · 416 pages

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

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Thomas E. Woods Jr. · 256 pages

The Middle East

Bernard Lewis · 448 pages

"As the Birthplace of three religions and many civilizations, the Middle East has for centuries been a center of knowledge and ideas, of techniques and commodities, and, at times, of military and political power. With the historical - and still growing - importance of the Middle East in modern politics, historian Bernard Lewis's cogent and scholary writing brings a wider understanding of the cultu

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Peter Frankopan · 382 pages

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations b

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

Philip Jenkins · 318 pages

In this groundbreaking book, renowned religion scholar Philip Jenkins offers a lost history, revealing that, for centuries, Christianity's center was actually in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with significant communities extending as far as China. The Lost History of Christianity unveils a vast and forgotten network of the world's largest and most influential Christian churches that existed t

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther

Roland H. Bainton

Actes and monuments

John Foxe · 589 pages

The Story of Civilization (11 Volume Set)

Will Durant, Ariel Durant

The Age of Faith

Will Durant · 1,196 pages

The Story of Civilization, Volume A history of medieval civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to A.D. 325-1300. This is the fourth volume of the classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning series.

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

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

A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

William Manchester · 318 pages

William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is the preeminent popular history of civilization's rebirth after the Dark Ages.

The New Penguin History of The World

J.M. Roberts · 1,248 pages

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 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 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

Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

Kathryn Harrison · 399 pages

A fully documented, inspiring portrait of the 15th-century peasant-turned-saint draws on historical facts, folklore and centuries of critical interpretation to evaluate the questions attributed to her character.

Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization

Norman F. Cantor · 584 pages

Studies on the ideas and institutions of Western civilization from 200 A.D. to 1500 A.D.