Christendom
The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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Publisher Description
A major reinterpretation of the religious superstate that came to define both Europe and Christianity itself, by one of our foremost medieval historians.
In the fourth century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows in this illuminating new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise and eventual dominance.
From Constantine the Great's pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire—which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction—to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleonlike capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.
Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, this is an unparalleled history of early Christianity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping, ambitious history, Heather (The Fall of the Roman Empire), a history professor at King's College London, surveys 1,000 years of European Christianity in exacting detail. He argues Christianity's rise wasn't inevitable, and that instead a complex series of historical accidents, religious innovations, and political maneuvers led to its eventual status as the continent's dominant religion. Heather chronicles events preceding the "first confessional Christian state" in fourth-century Rome through the 13th-century "climax of European Christianization," spotlighting how, for instance, the 391 CE destruction of the Serapeum, a pagan temple in Alexandria, signaled a shift from Roman paganism to Christianity at elite levels of society, and how the religious influence of Medieval figures such as Hildegard of Bingen—who experienced visions and founded her own monastic houses—was legitimated by the papacy so that the church might benefit from the grassroots enthusiasm she sparked. A particularly enlightening chapter chronicles the conversion of peoples in northwest Europe and illuminates missionaries' strategies for cultivating relationships with members of different strata of society, from kings to trade workers. Heather draws on careful scholarship to give due to the nuances of Christianity's spread, and constructs a narrative that's packed with specifics yet readable. History buffs should take note.
Customer Reviews
E-book version lacks critical formatting
Apparently nobody bothered to review the e-pub version prior to distribution because critical formatting such as em dashes and italics have been removed. That wouldn’t be a problem for many books, but for a technical book with thousands of em-dashes and specialized terms and references in the printed version, it renders it almost unreadable.