Following Zwingli explores history, scholarship, and memory in Reformation Zurich. The humanist culture of this city was shaped by a remarkable sodality of scholars, many of whom had been associated with Erasmus. In creating a new Christian order, Zwingli and his colleagues sought biblical, historical, literary, and political models to shape and defend their radical reforms. After Zwingli’s sudden death, the next generation was committed to the institutional and intellectual establishment ...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Tablet Book of the YearMarking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of mediev...

Archbishop Angelo Roncali (later Pope John XXIII) read True and False Reform during his years as papal nuncio in France and asked, A reform of the church 'is such a thing really possible?" A decade later as pope, he opened the Second Vatican Council by describing its goals in terms that reflected Congar's description of authentic reform: reform that penetrates to the heart of doctrine as a message of salvation for the whole of humanity, that retrieves the meaning of prophecy in a ...

George Williams' monumental The Radical Reformation has been an essential reference work for historians of early modern Europe, narrating in rich, interpretative detail the interconnected stories of radical groups operating at the margins of the mainline Reformation. In its scope—spanning all of Europe from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy—and its erudition, The Radical Reformation is without peer. Now in paperback format, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for any university...

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation.During the sixteenth...

Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the postmortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomized by the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king.” In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical dilemma posed by the “King’s two bodies”—the body natural and the body politic—back to the Mi...

This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided th...

A Study of the problems of the early history of the Franciscan ORder by one of the most important scholars of the ORder, this book seeks to contribute to a stronger historical understanding of the work of St. Francis byu looking into the debates and theories surrounding the formation of the Order, and the transformation of the "original ideals of St. Francis."

The eminent historian Patrick J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative docume...

In his Birkbeck Lectures, first published in 1969, Professor Ullmann throws new light on a familiar subject. He shows that the Carolingian renaissance had a wider and deeper meaning than has often been thought, especially in its political and ideological aspects. Displaying his mastery of both primary and secondary sources, Professor Ullmann presents an integrated history. He shows an epoch which holds a key to the better understanding not only of the subsequent medieval centuries, but als...

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry (ordo) in the community. By this definition, women were in fact ordained into several ministries. A radical change in the definitio...

History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time.So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of i...