The rise of Western Christendom
Subtitle: triumph and diversity, AD 200-1000
By: Peter Brown.
Series: The Making of Europe
Publisher: Blackwell
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Malden, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 368
Subjects: Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.; Church history -- Middle Ages, 600-1500.
Description: "This is a history of the people, struggles, defeats and victories, ideas and actions that together comprise the history of the first one thousand years of Christianity. It ranges across much of Asia, North Africa and Europe. It both captures the immediacy of decisive moments and explains how by the end of the period Christianity had become the dominant factor in political power and cultural life throughout the region. By establishing itself within the framework of two empires, the Roman and the Persian Sasanian, Christendom inherited from its beginnings their double universalism. The author traces the history of the distinctly Eastern Christendoms, of Western Christendom focused on Rome but with powerfully independent centres in France, Germany, England and Ireland. He recreates the vibrancy of Christian cultures and their claims to be the universal 'true' Christianity, and shows how the rise of centralized forms of Christianity were associated with the renewed imperial systems of Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire. He examines the impact of other religious traditions on the development of Christianity. He describes reactions to the explosive rise of Islam, and explains how, especially in North and Eastern Europe, the memories of a pagan past became part of the culture of what was now an officially Christian world. By AD 1000, a distinctive relation between past and present, between profane and sacred had emerged in Western Christendom, and a civilization that was by then irrevocably different from the Christendoms of the East." [Back cover].
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-350) and index.
Table of contents: title: "The laws of countries"; title: Christianity and empire; title: Tempora Christiana: Christian times; title: Virtutes Sanctorum...Strages Gentium: "Deeds of Saints...Slaughter of nations"; title: On the frontiers: Noricum, Ireland and Francia; title: Reverentia, Rusticitas: Caesarius of Arles to Gregory of Tours; title: Bishops, city and desert: East Rome; title: Regimen Animarum: Gregory the Great; title: Medicamenta Paenitentiae: Columbanus; title: Christianity in Asia; title: "The changing of the kingdoms:" Christians under Islam; title: Christianities of the North: Ireland and Saxon Britain; title: Micro-Christendoms; title: The crisis of the image: The Byzantine iconoclast controversy; title: Closing the frontier: Frisia and Germany; title: "To rule the Christian people:" Charlemagne; title: In Gear Dagum: "In days of yore" - Northern Christendom and its past.