Book description
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.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at
Oxford University. His
Thomas Cranmer
(1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize
and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of
Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700
(2004), which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy
Prize. His six-part television history of Christianity airs on BBC
television this autumn.
