The Christian world of the Middle Ages / Bernard Hamilton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hamilton, Bernard, 1932-2019

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Christian civilization--History.

Christian civilization.

History.

Church history--Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.

Church history.

Church history--Primitive and early church.

Church history--Middle Ages, 600-1500.

Church history--Middle Ages.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 256 pages 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps, portraits ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Stroud : Sutton, 2003.

Summary:

This Book examines the way in which Christianity spread throughout the known world in the Middle Ages and also explores the great variety of forms which it took. It spans the centuries from AD 312, when Constantine the Great ended the persecution of the Church, to 1500, when European overseas expansion inaugurated a period of Western religious dominance. In the medieval centuries Christianity spread throughout Western Europe and was taken by the Vikings to Iceland and Greenland and even perhaps the north American mainland. From the Holy City of Byzantium, Orthodox Christianity spread northwards into Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia. In North Africa there were large Christian communities living under Muslim rule, while in the Sudan and Ethiopia there were independent Christian kingdoms. The Christians of South India claimed to have been converted by the Apostle Thomas, while Christians from Persia evangelized nomadic tribes in central Asia living along the silk road leading to China. Though united in a common faith, the Christian churches took very different forms in these diverse cultures, and the evidence of this may still be seen in the Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe, the mosaics and icons of Byzantium, the great rock churches of Ethiopia, the illuminated manuscripts of Armenia and Georgia, and the art of medieval Russia, all of which are illustrated in the text. This book is essential reading for both the general reader and the specialist scholar and is unusual in describing the religious experience of the Christian churches of East and West during the medieval centuries in a single volume.

Contents:

Introduction: The Church in Late Antiquity 1

Chapter 1 The Medieval Western Church 19

Chapter 2 The Church in Byzantine Lands 59

Chapter 3 Christian Rivalry in the Levant and the Caucasus 100

Chapter 4 The Churches of Medieval Africa 138

Chapter 5 The Church in Medieval Asia 177.

Notes:

Errata slip inserted.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0750924055

OCLC:

45767287