Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Christian Church - History

When, in October 1517, Martin Luther pinned his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, he shattered the foundations of western Christendom. The Reformation of doctrine and practice that followed Luther's seismic action, and protest against the sale of indulgences, fragmented the Church and overturned previously accepted certainties and priorities. But it did more, challenging the relationship between spiritual and secular authority, perceptions of the supernatural, the interpretation of the past, the role of women in society and church, and clerical attitudes...

Written in the mid-fifteenth century, Pope Pius II s Commentaries are the only known autobiography of a reigning pontiff and a fundamental text in the history of Renaissance humanism.

In this book, Emily O Brien positions Pius expansive autobiographical text within that century s contentious debate over ecclesiastical sovereignty. Presenting the Commentaries as Pius response to the crisis of authority, legitimacy, and relevance that was engulfing the Renaissance papacy, she shows how the Commentaries function as both an aggressive assault on the papal...

Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God s movement through the ages. The nature and shape of...

Gregory the Great, whose reign spanned the years between 590 and 604 A.D., was one of the most remarkable figures of the early medieval Papacy. Aristocrat, administrator, teacher and scholar, he ascended the throne of St Peter at a time of acute crisis for the Roman Church.

Consul of God, first published in 1980, revises the traditional picture of Pope Gregory. It examines how he organised the central administration of the Papacy and his unremitting war on heresy and schism. Gregory also pioneered a new pastoral tradition in learning, promoted monasticism, and trained the...