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Scanned image of the book’s front cover

David Ayerst & A. S. T. Fisher.
Records of Christianity, volume II: Christendom.
Published Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977.
ISBN 0631171703.
Binding: hardback, stitch bound.
Printer: Billings Ltd., Guildford.
Size: 141×221×25mm.
Page count: text xvi,329pp; plates 8pp.
Main language: English.
Overall condition fair to good: this copy has some general wear and fading on its dustjacket, not too severe; a bit of foxing to the page edges; text appears to be free of marking.

This item £6.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

Weight without packaging: 592g.

How to order this book

Christendom, the sequel to The Church in the Roman Empire in the series Records of Christianity, deals with the Middle Ages in the words of contemporary writers. We still worship in the churches they were first to use. We know about the buildings, but their minds are often a closed book to us. What were they really like? The purpose of this book is to let them tell us. In these pages there is ignorance, superstition and brutality, but also abundance of heroic devotion and a spiritual sensitivity well beyond the reach of most of us.

Dante and Thomas Aquinas, Bede and Alfred the Great, Francis of Assisi and Peter Abelard are among the writers. But there is also an unknown Irish monk’s verses on his cat and a private soldier’s story of how, though beaten in the Third Crusade, he yet visited the Holy Places by courtesy of Saladin. There is much nonsense and much good sense in the instruction a Cistercian monk gave his Rhineland novices. Readers can listen to the debate which decided that Iceland should become Christian, and on what terms. They can trace in the Koran Israel’s blood relationship with Christianity and measure the distance between them. They may meet Jews and simple pagans. They may travel to China at a time when it seemed possible that Asia might replace the lost Christian heartland in the Middle East.

The illustrations are as much an integral part of the book as the extracts. Introductions and notes are included to help fix the passages in time and place, an important matter in a book which spans eight centuries and five thousand miles. This is not a book for the theologian or the political historian, though there are of course both theology and politics in it as of course there had to be — Christendom is both a religious and a political conception. It is meant for the general reader — for the parson in his study, the teacher in the classroom, the man or women in the pew, and for anybody, Christian or agnostic, who has any interest in religion.

Illustrations: 19 drawings, 8 pages of plates, all monochrome
Maps & plans: 3

Notes: no
Tables: no
Genealogies: no
Chronology: no
Glossary: no
Bibliography: no
Indexes: Subjects; Persons; Places.

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