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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 first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first truly global history of Christianity.
| ISBN | 0713998695 | | Pages | 1216 | | ISBN13 | 9780713998696
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 1974 | | Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Allen Lane | | Height (mm) | 240 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 165 | | Publication date | 24 Sep 2009 | | Spine width (mm) | 72 | | DEWEY | 270 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
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| | | List of Illustrations | | | | | | List of Maps | | | | | | Introduction | | 1 | | Pt. I | | A Millennium of Beginnings (1000 BCE-100 CE) | | | | 1 | | Greece and Rome (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) | | 19 | | 2 | | Israel (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) | | 47 | | Pt. II | | One Church, One Faith, One Lord? (4 BCE-450 CE) | | | | 3 | | A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE) | | 77 | | 4 | | Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300) | | 112 | | 5 | | The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300) | | 155 | | 6 | | The Imperial Church (300-451) | | 189 | | Pt. III | | Vanishing Futures: East and South (451-1500) | | | | 7 | | Defying Chalcedon: Asia and Africa (451-622) | | 231 | | 8 | | Islam: The Great Realignment (622-1500) | | 255 | | Pt. IV | | The Unpredictable Rise of Rome (300-1300) | | | | 9 | | The Making of Latin Christianity (300-500) | | 289 | | 10 | | Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500-1000) | | 319 | | 11 | | The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200) | | 363 | | 12 | | A Church for All People? (1100-1300) | | 396 | | Pt. V | | Orthodoxy: The Imperial Faith (451-1800) | | | | 13 | | Faith in a New Rome (451-900) | | 427 | | 14 | | Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700) | | 466 | | 15 | | Russia: The Third Rome (900-1800) | | 503 | | Pt. VI | | Western Christianity Dismembered (1300-1800) | | | | 16 | | Perspectives on the True Church (1300-1517) | | 551 | | 17 | | A House Divided (1517-1660) | | 604 | | | More... | | |
The author has a well-established reputation for academic studies of the Reformation period but in this work he attempts to widen his field to encompass the entire history and pre-history, of Christianity, a global tour dhorizon over 3000 years. His research has been exhaustive and the byways he has brought to light can be fascinating. However, as an academic work it is too clearly influenced by the authors personal prejudices, which risk undermining the intellectual integrity of the book, despite the evident hard work which has gone into its writing. - Robin Saunders Write a review
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