The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

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

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther

Roland H. Bainton

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

Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie · 383 pages

"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt...Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the ordin

Actes and monuments

John Foxe · 589 pages

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

David Levering Lewis · 384 pages

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian re-examines what we thought we knew. Lewis reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished--a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--while proto-Europe made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery.--From publ

Joan of Arc: A History

Helen Castor · 352 pages

The acclaimed historian Helen Castor -- bestselling author and BBC broadcaster of She-Wolves, the story of England's queens before Elizabeth I -- returns with the incredible story of Joan of Arc, as only a biographer of Castor's enormous talents can tell it. Helen Castor brings us afresh a gripping life of Joan of Arc. Instead of the icon, she gives us a living, breathing young woman, a roaring gi

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 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.

Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

Roger Crowley · 320 pages

The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam

Bernard Lewis · 176 pages

The Templars: History & Myth

Michael Haag · 368 pages

God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

Rodney Stark

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

Thomas Asbridge · 784 pages

From a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (The New Yorker) comes the most authoritative, readable single-volume historyof the brutal struggle for the Holy Land.Nine hundred years ago, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the Pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both faiths. Over the tw

Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel

John Guy · 462 pages

How the Irish Saved Civilization

Thomas Cahill · 246 pages

From the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne - the "dark ages" - learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent. The great heritage of western civilization - from the Greek and Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works - would have been utterly lost were it not for the holy men and women of unconquered Ireland. In this delightful and illuminating look into a cru

God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Christopher Tyerman · 1,023 pages

The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were fi

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph & Diversity 200–1000

Peter R.L. Brown · 353 pages

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom

Tom Holland · 476 pages

**Bestselling historian and broadcaster Tom Holland gives a thrilling panoramic account of the birth of the new Western Europe in the year 1000** **'An exhilarating sweep across European history either side of the year 1000; riveting'** ALLAN MASSIE, *SPECTATOR* **'I relished the blood and thunder narrative - the work of a great storyteller at his best'** DOMINIC SANDBROOK, *EVENING STANDARD* *

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 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

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

Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade

James Reston Jr. · 312 pages