The Church in the Early Middle Ages

The creation of a new history of the Church at the beginning of the third millennium is an ambitious but necessary project. Perhaps nowhere is it needed more than in re-describing the Church's development - its life and its thinking - in the period that followed the end of the 'early Church' in antiquity. The cultural, social and political dominance of Christendom in what we now call "the West," from about 600-1300, made the Christian Church a shaper of the modern world in respects which go far beyond its religious infleunce. Writing with her customary authority, and with a magisterial grasp of the original sources, G R Evans brings this formative era vividly to life both for the student of religious history and general reader. She concentrates as much on the colorful human episodes of the time as on broader institutional and intellectual developments. The result is a compelling and thoroughly modern introduction to devotional and theological thought in the early Middle Ages as well as to ecclesiastical and pastoral life at large.

 

The Christian Church, first defined as a religion of love, has interacted with Judaism, Islam and other world religions in ways in which there has been as much warfare as charity. Some of the results are seen in the tensions of the modern world, tensions which are proving very hard to resolve – not least because of a lack of awareness of the history behind the thinking which has brought the Church to where it is now. In the light of that lack, a new history of the Christian Church is badly needed. There is much to be said for restoring to the general reader, whether Christian or not, a familiarity with the network of ideas about what the Church ‘is’ and what it should be ‘doing’ as a vessel of Christian life and thought. This series aims to be both fresh and traditional. It will be organised so that the boundary-dates between volumes fall in some unexpected places. It will attempt to look at its conventional subject matter from the critical perspective of the early twenty-first century, where the Church has a confusing myriad of faces. It ranges from Vatican strictures on the use of birth control and the indissolubility of marriage, and outspoken German academic theologians who challenge the Churches’ authority, to the enthusiasm of black Baptist congregations in the USA joyously affirming a faith with few defining parameters. Behind all these variations is a rich history of thinking, effort and struggle. And within it, at the heart of matters, is the Church. The I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church seeks to discover that innermost self through the layers of its multiple manifestations over twenty centuries.

Forthcoming titles in this series:
The Early Church by Morwenna Ludlow, University of Oxford
The Early Middle Ages by G. R. Evans, University of Cambridge
The Later Middle Ages by Norman P Tanner,
Gregorian University
Early Modern Christianity by Patrick Provost-Smith, Harvard University
The Long Eighteenth Century by David Hempton, Boston University
The Nineteenth Century by Frances Knight, University of Wales, Lampeter
The Modern Age by Jeremy Morris, University of Cambridge