Diarmaid MacCulloch

Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read-a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Breathtaking in ambition, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith. Christianity will teach modern readers things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. And we discover the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. This book encompasses all of intellectual history-we meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the enlightenment and the age of exploration, and shaping the course of World War I and World War II. We are living in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with deep feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This awe-inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.

At a time when men and women were prepared to kill--and be killed--for their faith, the Protestant Reformation tore the Western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning history brilliantly recreates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians--from the zealous Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses to the polemical John Calvin to the radical Igantius Loyola, from the tortured Thomas Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II. Drawing together the many strands of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and ranging widely across Europe and the New World, MacCulloch reveals as never before how these dramatic upheavals affected everyday lives--overturning ideas of love, sex, death, and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.

Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, such that in the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King. That decade was one of the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break with the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all monasteries, and the coming of the Protestantism. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision has been notoriously difficult.Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography is the most complete life ever written of this elusive figure, making connections not previously seen and revealing the channels through which power in early Tudor England flowed. It overturns many received interpretations, for example that Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were allies because of their common religious sympathies, showing how he in fact destroyed her. It introduces the many different personalities contributing to these foundational years, all worrying about what MacCulloch calls the 'terrifyingly unpredictable' Henry VIII, and allows readers to feel that they are immersed in all this, that it is going on around them. For a time, the self-made 'ruffian', as he described himself - ruthless, adept in the exercise of power, quietly determined in religious revolution - was master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.

A major new assessment of one of the most controversial topics in historyFew matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex and religion. Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. The issue goes to the heart of present-day religion.The Bible observes that God made humanity ‘for a little while lower than the angels’. If humans are that close to angels, where lies the difference? Is it human sexuality and what we do with it? In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history. There have followed revolutions in the place of women in society, a new place for same-sex love amid the spectrum of human emotions, and a public exploration of gender and trans identity. For many the new situation has brought exciting liberation – for others, fury and fear.This book seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a three-thousand-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. The message of Lower Than The Angels is simple, necessary and to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.

A provocative history of the role of silence in Christianity by the award-winning, New York Times bestselling authorIn this essential work of religious history, the New York Times bestselling author of Christianity explores the vital role of silence in the Christian story.How should one speak to God? Are our prayers more likely to be heard if we offer them quietly at home or loudly in church? How can we really know if God is listening? From the earliest days, Christians have struggled with these questions. Their varied answers have defined the boundaries of Christian faith and established the language of our most intimate appeals for guidance or forgiveness.MacCulloch shows how Jesus chose to emphasize silence as an essential part of his message and how silence shaped the great medieval monastic communities of Europe. He also examines the darker forms of religious silence, from the church’s embrace of slavery and its muted reaction to the Holocaust to the cover-up by Catholic authorities of devastating sexual scandals.A groundbreaking work that will change our understanding of the most fundamental wish to be heard by God, Silence gives voice to the greatest mysteries of faith.

Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the archbishop of Canterbury who guided England through the early Reformation—and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography of him for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere.Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book.MacCulloch skillfully reconstructs the crises Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, and his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as queen to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In jail after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly repudiated his achievements, but he found the courage to turn the day of his death into a dramatic demonstration of his Protestant faith.From this vivid account Cranmer emerges a more sharply focused figure than before, more conservative early in his career than admirers have allowed, more evangelical than Anglicanism would later find comfortable. A hesitant hero with a tangled life story, his imperishable legacy is his contribution in the prayer book to the shape and structure of English speech and through this to the molding of an international language and the theology it expressed.

Diarmaid MacCulloch illuminates the significance of Edward's turbulent and neglected reign. He takes a fresh look at the life and beliefs of the young king and of the ruthless politicians who jostled for power around him. He analyzes the single-minded strategy of the Protestant Revolution and assesses the support it had among the people of England.

The most profound characteristic of Western Europe in the Middle Ages was its cultural and religious unity, a unity secured by a common alignment with the Pope in Rome, and a common language - Latin - for worship and scholarship. The Reformation shattered that unity, and the consequences are still with us today. In All Things Made New, Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the New York Times bestseller Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, examines not only the Reformation's impact across Europe, but also the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the special evolution of religion in England, revealing how one of the most turbulent, bloody, and transformational events in Western history has shaped modern society.The Reformation may have launched a social revolution, MacCulloch argues, but it was not caused by social and economic forces, or even by a secular idea like nationalism; it sprang from a big idea about death, salvation, and the afterlife. This idea - that salvation was entirely in God's hands and there was nothing humans could do to alter his decision - ended the Catholic Church's monopoly in Europe and altered the trajectory of the entire future of the West.By turns passionate, funny, meditative, and subversive, All Things Made New takes readers onto fascinating new ground, exploring the original conflicts of the Reformation and cutting through prejudices that continue to distort popular conceptions of a religious divide still with us after five centuries. This monumental work, from one of the most distinguished scholars of Christianity writing today, explores the ways in which historians have told the tale of the Reformation, why their interpretations have changed so dramatically over time, and ultimately, how the contested legacy of this revolution continues to impact the world today.

The English Reformation was the event which chiefly shaped English identity well into the twentieth century. It made the English kingdom a self-consciously Protestant state dominating the British Isles, and boasting an established Church which eventually developed a peculiar religious agenda, Anglicanism. Although Henry VIII triggered a break with the Pope in his eccentric quest to rid himself of an inconveniently loyal wife, the Reformation soon slipped from his control, and in the reigns of his Tudor successors, it developed a momentum which made it one of the success stories of European Protestantism. In this book, MacCulloch discusses the developing Reformation in England through the later Tudor reigns: Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. He provides a narrative of events, then discusses the ideas which shaped the English Reformation, and surveys the ways in which the English reacted to it, how far and quickly they accepted it and assesses those who remained dissenters. This new edition is fully updated to take account of new material in the field that has appeared in the last decade.

Book by MacCulloch, Diarmaid

A fascinating history of the growth in monastic and papal power that preceded the Crusades—excerpted from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s award-winning New York Times bestseller, The First Three Thousand Years.A product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The First Three Thousand Years stretches from the Greek Platonists and the origins of the Hebrew Bible to the present and encompasses the globe. In this excerpt, MacCulloch chronicles the rise of monasteries like the great Cluny Abbey, which formed orders that reached across secular kingdoms, enjoying exclusive papal privileges and encouraging their followers to make pilgrimages among towering cathedrals and far-flung shrines. Meanwhile, the introduction of the tithe, expanding control over marriage, and a new emphasis on Purgatory brought penitent parishioners even closer to the Church and dependent on ministry. By the time Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, the practice of indulgences had made possible his grant that all who died in a state of repentance and confession while fighting would gain immediate entry into heaven. Holy War spawned whole new orders, most famously the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, as soldiers from across Europe joined the campaigns of conquest toward Jerusalem. The many causes and consequences of these clashes between Christianity and Islam are captured here in illuminating detail with elegance and wit.Diarmaid MacCulloch’s latest book, A Christian History, is available from Viking.

Suffolk was one of the most interesting counties in 16th-century England. The scene of the only two successful rebellions in Tudor England, Suffolk also underwent an incredible turnaround from being a haven of Catholic worship in 1500 to becoming one of the strongholds of radical Protestantism less than a century later. That same period saw the shocking ousting of its Duke in 1538, an influential landowner in the county and close confidant of Henry VIII. By investigating the historical background to such dramatic developments, this book throws new light on the relationship between the counties and the central government and on the changing political and religious views at the time of the English Reformation.

The Bacon family fortunes were founded by Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, and father to the philosopher Francis Bacon; among their properties was the now-vanished Suffolk mansion of Redgrave Hall, and it is from here that this fascinating collection of letters originates. The correspondence centres on Francis's half-brother Nicholas, Premier Baronet of England, one of the Puritan gentry who ran the government of Elizabethan and Jacobean Suffolk, and touches on many of the most important issues and events of the period. One important component is a fascinating run of letters describing a failed marriage negotiation for young Nicholas's sister between the Protestant Lord Keeper and the wily guardians of a young Catholic, William Yaxley, in the fragile opening years of Elizabeth I's Protestant religious settlement. It also includes papers of the flamboyant courtier and diplomat Sir Robert Drury, a Bacon relative by marriage [and original inhabitant of 'Drury Lane' in London]: he was friend and patron to John Donne, who features in the correspondence. Later letters touch on the Civil War in East Anglia. Overall, the letters reveal a wealth of detail about the lives and preoccupations of English provincial magnates and their often uneasy relationship to the great political figures of the realm. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH is Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford.

Der Preistrager des Dr. Leopold Lucas-Preises 2019, der britische Theologe und Kirchenhistoriker Diarmaid MacCulloch, ist ein international angesehener Kenner der Reformationszeit. Fur den Kirchenhistoriker ist die Geschichte des Christentums zur Lebensaufgabe geworden. In seinem Festvortrag anlasslich der Verleihung hebt er hervor, dass ihn in seinen Forschungen immer wieder uberraschte, wie wandelbar sich das Christentum durch die Jahrtausende zeigte. MacCullochs Ansatz ist deshalb so bedeutend, weil er die Geschichte der Reformation zwischen 1490 und 1700 nicht als jeweils nationalen, sondern als polyzentrischen, konfessionsubergreifenden Prozess im Europa der Fruhen Neuzeit begreift. Dabei brachten unterschiedliche Krafte eine Modernisierung voran, die zum einen die europaische Gesellschaft bis heute pragt und zum anderen mit der Idee der Gedankenfreiheit die Grundlage der Aufklarung und des modernen Denkens vorwegnahm.

The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Reformation presents a modern reader's history of Christianity that traces the origins of the Hebrew Bible and chronicles three major strands of the Christian faith, documenting the religion's s

The English Reformation was the event which chiefly shaped English identity well into the twentieth century. It made the English kingdom a self-consciously Protestant state dominating the British Isles, and boasting an established Church which eventually developed a peculiar religious agenda, Anglicanism. Although Henry VIII triggered a break with the Pope in his eccentric quest to rid himself of an inconveniently loyal wife, the Reformation soon slipped from his control, and in the reigns of his Tudor successors, it developed a momentum which made it one of the success stories of European Protestantism. In this book, MacCulloch discusses the developing Reformation in England through the later Tudor Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. He provides a narrative of events, then discusses the ideas which shaped the English Reformation, and surveys the ways in which the English reacted to it, how far and quickly they accepted it and assesses those who remained dissenters. This new edition is fully updated to take account of new material in the field that has appeared in the last decade.

«Di poco inferiori agli angeli»: così ci descrive la Bibbia. Se gli esseri umani sono tanto vicini ai celesti messaggeri di Dio, forse lo scarto risiede proprio nella nostra sessualità e in ciò che scegliamo di farne? Per millenni il cristianesimo ha influenzato il modo di intendere l'amore, il desiderio e la famiglia, ma nell'ultimo mezzo secolo abbiamo assistito a una svolta cruciale nel nostro approccio alla sessualità e all'identità di genere. Se un tempo le dispute teologiche riguardavano dogmi come la Trinità, oggi sono le questioni più intime dell'esistenza umana a divenire fonte di nuove riflessioni, nonché di nuove divisioni, in un'epoca di straordinarie trasformazioni sociali. Con questo libro, Diarmaid MacCulloch, professore emerito di Storia della Chiesa all'Università di Oxford - arrendendosi al destino, nonché alla vocazione, dello storico - si adopera per disturbare «molti fatti da tempo indisturbati» e ci propone un illuminante riesame del passato. Dalle ambiguità delle antiche scritture, che invitano a nuove interpretazioni, alle ribellioni silenziose di monaci e mistiche; dalle riforme radicali di Lutero, che condussero all'abolizione del celibato clericale, all'Illuminismo, che sfidò convenzioni religiose secolari ridefinendo il rapporto tra ragione, fede e passioni umane, vedremo come il cristianesimo si sia costantemente reinventato di fronte a sfide inattese. Un percorso intellettuale che incoraggia la comprensione e, dunque, costituisce un potente antidoto alla paura, che è sempre, in fondo, paura dell'ignoto. Mostrandoci come concetti quali il celibato, la monogamia e l'omosessualità siano stati ridefiniti, repressi o celebrati a seconda delle epoche, queste pagine fanno affiorare un messaggio tanto semplice quanto la storia del cristianesimo è fatta di contraddizioni e di straordinaria complessità, così come lo sono i desideri, i timori e le speranze più profonde dell'umanità.