The book is a study of Gregory the Great, the pope who sent Augustine (of Canterbury) and his fellow missionaries to convert the heathen English to Christianity (597). Markus gives a full account of Gregory's life and work, his thought and spirituality, within the setting of the world at the end of the sixth century. At a time of catastrophic change in Europe, Gregory's work as pope stands on the threshold of medieval Western Europe. The book deals with every aspect of his pontificate, providing a major contribution to the study of late antique society. -- No modern equivalent in any language -- Takes into account advance in historical scholarship over the 90 years since Dudden, and modern perspectives in the study of Late Antiquity -- Downloaded frontmatter (incl maps), excerpt, index via Air to DBOX -- added to Evernote

Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium--long history, she identifies the fundamental questions about Byzantium--what it was, and what special significance it holds for us today. Bringing the latest scholarship to a general audience in accessible prose, Herrin focuses each short chapter around a representative theme, event, monument, or historical figure, and examines it within the full sweep of Byzantine history--from the foundation of Constantinople, the magnificent capital city built by Constantine the Great, to its capture by the Ottoman Turks.

She argues that Byzantium's crucial role as the eastern defender of Christendom against Muslim expansion during the early Middle Ages made Europe--and the modern Western world--possible. Herrin captivates us with her discussions of all facets of Byzantine culture and society. She walks us through the complex ceremonies of the imperial court. She describes the transcendent beauty and power of the church of Hagia Sophia, as well as chariot races, monastic spirituality, diplomacy, and literature. She reveals the fascinating worlds of military usurpers and ascetics, eunuchs and courtesans, and artisans who fashioned the silks, icons, ivories, and mosaics so readily associated with Byzantine art.

An innovative history written by one of our foremost scholars, Byzantium reveals this great civilization's rise to military and cultural supremacy, its spectacular destruction by the Fourth Crusade, and its revival and final conquest in 1453. - no ebook - lots of illustrations - Introduction downloaded to Tab S2

1st volume of 2 covering her 40 year career - This volume explores the political, cultural, and ecclesiastical forces that linked the metropolis of Byzantium to the margins of its far-flung empire. Focusing on the provincial region of Hellas and Peloponnesos in central and southern Greece, Judith Herrin shows how the prestige of Constantinople was reflected in the military, civilian, and ecclesiastical officials sent out to govern the provinces. She evokes the ideology and culture of the center by examining different aspects of the imperial court, including diplomacy, ceremony, intellectual life, and relations with the church. Particular topics treat the transmission of mathematical manuscripts, the burning of offensive material, and the church's role in distributing philanthropy.

Herrin contrasts life in the capital with provincial life, tracing the adaptation of a largely rural population to rule by Constantinople from the early medieval period onward. The letters of Michael Choniates, archbishop of Athens from 1182 to 1205, offer a detailed account of how this highly educated cleric coped with life in an imperial backwater, and demonstrate a synthesis of ancient Greek culture and medieval Christianity that was characteristic of the Byzantine elite.

This collection of essays spans the entirety of Herrin's influential career and draws together a significant body of scholarship on problems of empire. It features a general introduction, two previously unpublished essays, and a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader analysis of the unusual brilliance and longevity of Byzantium.

Judith Herrin is the Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, and The Formation of Christendom (all Princeton). -- downloaded Introduction to Tab S2

What is the character of secularism in countries that were not pervaded by Christianity, such as China, India, and the nations of the Middle East? To what extent is the secular an imposition of colonial rule? How does secularism comport with local religious cultures in Africa, and how does it work with local forms of power and governance in Latin America? Has modern secularism evolved organically, or is it even necessary, and has it always meant progress? A vital extension of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, in which he exhaustively chronicled the emergence of secularism in Latin Christendom, this anthology applies Taylor's findings to secularism's global migration. (...) What began as a modern reaction to—as well as a stubborn extension of—Latin Christendom has become a complex export shaped by the world's religious and political systems. Brilliantly alternating between intellectual and methodological approaches, this volume fosters a greater engagement with the phenomenon across disciplines.
Preface, by Akeel Bilgrami
1. Can Secularism Travel?, by Charles Taylor
2. The Sufi and the State, by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
3. The Individual and Collective Self-Liberation Model of Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
4. Creating Democratically Friendly Twin Tolerations Outside of Latin Christendom: Tunisia, by Alfred Stepan
5. Secularism and the Mexican Revolution, by Claudio Lomnitz
6. Is Confucianism Secular?, by Peter van der Veer
7. Disenchantment Deferred, by Sudipta Kaviraj
8. An Ancient Indian Secular Age?, by Rajeev Bhargava
9. Gandhi's Radicalism: An Interpretation, by Akeel Bilgrami
10. A Secular Age Outside Latin Christendom: Charles Taylor Responds

EDITORS: Hugh McLeod, University of Birmingham and Werner Ustorf, University of Birmingham -- 1. Introduction, Hugh McLeod *--* 2. The secularisation decade: what the 1960s have done to the study of religious history, Callum G. Brown *--* 3. Christendom in decline: the Swedish case, Eva M. Hamberg *--* 4. New Christianity: indifference and diffused spirituality, Yves Lambert *--* 5. Established churches and the growth of religious pluralism: a case study of Christianisation and secularisation in England since 1700, David Hempton *--* 6. Catholicism in Ireland, Sheridan Gilley *--* 7. Long-term religious developments in the Netherlands, c. 1750–2000, Peter Van Rooden *--* 8. The potency of 'Christendom': The example of the 'Darmstädter Wort' (1947), Martin Greschat. *--* 9. The dechristianisation of death in modern France, Thomas Kselman *--* 10. The impact of technology on Catholicism in France (1850–1950), Michel Lagrée *--* 11. Semantic structures of religious change in modern Germany, Lucian Hölscher *--* 12. Master-narratives of long-term religious change, Jeffery Cox *--* 13. A missiological postscript Werner Ustorf.

Original in The New Humanist June 2011 -- The claim that Christianity provides the bedrock of Western culture might serve the interests of extremists, but it is a betrayal of a far more complex history. In the warped mind of Anders Breivik, his murderous rampages in Oslo and Utoya earlier this year were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. Not a religious war but a cultural one, to defend what Breivik called Europe's "cultural, social, identity and moral platform". Few but the most psychopathic can have any sympathy for Breivik's homicidal frenzy. Yet the idea that Christianity provides the foundations of Western civilisation, and of its political ideals and ethical values, and that Christian Europe is under threat, from Islam on the one side and "cultural Marxists" on the other, finds a widespread hearing. The erosion of Christianity, in this narrative, will lead inevitably to the erosion of Western civilisation and to the end of modern, liberal democracy. -- useful roundup of the pundits and publishers churning out these claims -- downloaded pdf to Note

An historian can define European identity descriptively, as Krzysztof Pomian demonstrates in a tour of European culture since the first millennium before Christ. But the real controversy lies elsewhere, in the political question: what of the European past is worth preserving? (..) What are we ready to abandon, and what are we attached to so strongly that under no circumstances will we allow ourselves be deprived of? To what extent must the future be patterned according to our expectations, rooted in the past, and to what extent are we ready to leave the shaping of it to forces we do not control, and which seem to be causing a growing estrangement from our familiar ideas about how that future should look? These questions, in many different forms, (..) must be addressed not to historians but to politicians, and in the last instance to the European citizenry, which as ultimate decision-maker must provide an answer. European identity is a historical fact. More and more, it is also becoming a political problem. -- Original in Dutch -- First published in L. Ornstein and L. Breemer (eds.), Paleis Europa. Grote denkers over Europa, as "De Europese identiteit : een historisch feit en een politiek problem", De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam 2007, 29-54 (Dutch version); Transit 37 (2009) (German version). -- downloaded pdf to Note

In 2010, Samuel Moyn published The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which offered an alternative historical explanation for the origins of human rights. He rejected narratives that viewed human rights as a long-term historical product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, The French Revolution, or Enlightenment rationalism, arguing that human rights as it is now understood began to emerge only during the 1970s. Prior to this, according to Moyn, rights were connected to the nation-state and had nothing to do with an international standard of morality or justice. In addressing critiques of The Last Utopia, Moyn has given considerable attention to the relationship between human rights and religion, conceding that there is, undoubtedly, a relationship between Christianity—Catholicism in particular—and human rights, but arguing that the “death of Christian Europe” by the 1960s “forced a complete reinvention of the meaning of human rights embedded in European identity both formally and really since the war”. Contributors offer their thoughts on Moyn’s article “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” which became a central focus (see excerpt) in his forthcoming book, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Contributors also respond to “Christian Human Rights,” the introductory essay written for this series. -- downloaded pdfs but their footnotes and links don't work, so collected them in Evernote them

Gregory's "hyperpluralism" is MacIntyre-eque - there's no longer a shared notion of the summum bonnum. This anti-modernity can't tell the difference between liberal pluralism and the bogeyman of relativism. Peterson's response is one of the better since it accepts the basic frame of the need for some shared values -- "the structuring principles [for political and social life] of modern Western societies are not arbitrary assertions but rather principles that are connected with one another, interwoven with historical developments and representative of human life and ideals." He shows 8 points of "soft consensus" and ..."While it would be possible to claim that these points are not... what Gregory calls the “Life Questions,” [they] rest upon basic values that have correlations with views of the person and conceptions of the good." -- "The entire Western world has agreed (1) to live with a modern democratic political order, (2) to enforce concepts of unalienable human rights, (3) to uphold the rule of law, and (4) to secure the separation of powers. (...) the high view of the individual, and thus the high view of that individual’s opinion, is presumed [...and is also a] 5th point. (...) There are many other values which follow from the high view of the individual (...) they presume the value of freedom.. [which is both...] a presupposition of 3 and 4 and a 6th point. (...) The law is a concrete representation of the norms and regulations that are held to be not only equitable, just, and good, but also reasonable. The importance of reason and rational justification therefore belongs in the soft consensus as a presupposition of the rule of law, but also as [a] 7th point. (...) [The] idea of the separation of powers (...) [presumes] cooperation in the formal execution of power, administration, and management. A high regard for cooperation therefore belongs in the soft consensus as a presupposition of the separation of powers, but also as an 8th point. The most effective cooperation [depends] upon general agreements regarding shared goals and a basic goodwill between the cooperating parties."

Black gives it high marks for (1) the introductory chapters that set up the issues and debates re use of counterfactuals and (2) the diversity of issue areas tackled, such as what if Europe hadn't adopted Christianity. Goldstone has a chapter framing William_III victory in the Glorious Revolution as critical turning point for industrial revolution, European political economy and Great Divergence. Carla Pestana has a brief contrary comment piece. Includes usual suspects like Victor Hanson and Joel Mokyr.

Acton never completed his projected History of Liberty. We do have however several collections of his writings such as this one which contains 2 chapters from this planned history – on liberty in antiquity and Christianity – and many book reviews where one can piece together Acton’s approach to the writing of such a history. This volume consists of articles reprinted from the following journals: The Quarterly Review, The English Historical Review, The Nineteenth Century, The Rambler, The Home and Foreign Review, The North British Review, The Bridgnorth Journal. *--* CHRONICLE. *-* INTRODUCTION. *-* I: THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY. *-* II: THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY. *-* III: SIR ERSKINE MAY’S DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE. *-* IV: THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. *-* V: THE PROTESTANT THEORY OF PERSECUTION *-* VI: POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH. *-* VII: INTRODUCTION TO L. A. BURD’S EDITION OF IL PRINCIPE BY MACHIAVELLI. *-* VIII: MR. GOLDWIN SMITH’S IRISH HISTORY. *-* IX: NATIONALITY. *-* X: DÖLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER. *-* XI: DÖLLINGER’S HISTORICAL WORK. *-* XII: CARDINAL WISEMAN AND THE HOME AND FOREIGN REVIEW. *'* XIII: CONFLICTS WITH ROME. *-* XIV: THE VATICAN COUNCIL. *-* XV: A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES. By Henry Charles Lea. *-* XVI: THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. By James Bryce. *-* XVII: HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND. By Robert Flint. -- downloaded kindle version of html

ANDERS INGRAM - National University of Ireland, Galway --The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) generated a higher volume of English writing than any other seventeenth-century event involving the Ottomans. This article focuses upon ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege and relates them to the concurrent English political context of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis. Situating these ballads within the publication milieu of pamphlet news and political polemic, it examines the figures who produced them and the audiences they were aimed at. Following from this, it shows how the use of commonplace images and associations with the ‘Turk’ as a recurring figure in early modern writing allowed these ballads to find, or depict, synchronicities between the events of the siege of Vienna, and the English political scene. -* I am grateful to Daniel Carey and Christine Woodhead for their help and comments at various stages.

Samuel von Pufendorf, The Divine Feudal Law: Or, Covenants with Mankind, Represented, trans. Theophilus Dorrington, ed. with an Introduction by Simone Zurbruchen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002). 07/10/2014. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/177> -- The Divine Feudal Law sets forth Pufendorf’s basis for the reunion of the Lutheran and Calvinist confessions. This attempt to seek a “conciliation” between the confessions complements the concept of toleration discussed in Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. In both works Pufendorf examines the proper way to secure the peaceful coexistence of different confessions in a state. -- Published posthumously in 1695 - likely that timing of translation part of ecumenical impulse within Protestantism, reinforcing the goal of the War of the Spanish Succession as protection of the Protestant Interest opposed to Louis XIV, despite being allied not only with German (Lutheran) members of the Holy Roman Empire but with the Catholic Emperor himself -- downloaded pdf to Note

Radner, a Protestant, [argues] that something in our modern world has gone wrong. However, he places the blame less on an elusive pattern of secularization (Taylor) or on Protestant fragmentation (Gregory) than on the much wider phenomenon of Christian disunity... Christian disunity is what gave birth to—or rather, miscarried—the liberal democratic state. These are massive claims, and Radner marshals the erudition... A Brutal Unity is ..an "eristology," which Radner defines as "the study of hostility in its disordering forms and forces." -- Radner [opens with a] polemic against Wm Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence, [which] unjustifiably absolves Christians from their share in the violence of the liberal state. ...the nations as we know them arose from the inability of Christians to refrain from mutual murder. Radner marches his readers deep into the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.... "[Nazi death squads] were Protestants and Catholics both." To suggest otherwise—whether to exonerate Pope Pius XII or to overemphasize the role of Bonhoeffer—is to succumb to "hallucinogenic fantasy." "The dead bodies, as it were, are already gathered by the time churches admit to complicity in their murder." Radner explores Catholic and Protestant .. attempts to deny the reality of Christian disunity by carving out an inviolable space of "the Church as such"... The saving of the church from her own sins by concocting an invisible or elusive sanctity is, admittedly, a traditional theological move, but... were this approach employed Christologically, it would be plainly Gnostic. - Radner [makes] the villain of his story Ephiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), who listed heresies and distanced the church from her enemies, especially the Jews. ?..inaugurated the "Epiphanian paradigm" and its program of exclusionary violence...the church's "brutal unity." Providentialism and proceduralism are the [church's] blinders... The former is the notion that God was somehow at work in church councils, however violent; the latter is the idea that somehow bureaucratic decisions and parliamentary process betray the hand of God. We should, Radner believes, trust neither.

Fabulous summary by Noll of the different religious groups in 17thC England and the New England migrations -- Winship also challenges the many accounts of early-modern republicanism that have pictured it as an essentially secular ideology strongly inimical, with its all-out focus on worldly power, to the Puritans' strict Calvinism. Instead, he argues that the "godly republicanism" of early New England came directly from spiritual sources. The Puritans' greatest desire was to bring about biblical reform of churches corrupted by abuses of unchecked power. -- Explicitly Christian virtue thus grounded the health of the "commonwealth," an expressly republican term. Those scholars, including myself, who have described the republicanism of the Revolutionary era as secular may reply that the early Puritan arrangement was soon modified by the Puritans themselves and then completely abrogated when Massachusetts was taken over as a royal colony in 1684. But Winship nonetheless makes a strong case for a definite Christian root to the founding republican principles of the United States. This re-interpretation of early New England history hinges on careful discrimination among the different varieties of English and American Puritans. Never, one might think, has a scholar made so much of so little. Yet paying close heed to how he describes these Puritan varieties is, in the end, convincing. The following chart, which sets things out as an "invention" in the Ramist logic so beloved by the Puritans, summarizes those distinctions, though it would have clarified Winship's argument if he himself had provided such a scorecard.

"Turk plays" popular up to Charles I - late-Elizabethan theatre drew on a conventional narrative of fear that was also.. one of fascination. ?..also energised by 2 linked events: the Reformation and Elizabeth's promotion of Anglo-Ottoman relations after excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570. ?..in the last decade or so of the 16thC a sizeable proportion of the playhouse repertory became deeply influenced by this development... a complex artistic, ideological, and commercial phenomenon. -- In shifting from "author"-centred approaches that many theorists believe to be anachronistic to an emphasis on how companies operated, scholars have drawn attention to ...early modern theatre as a collective enterprise. - By its very nature the staging of the Ottoman Empire was sustained by artistic cross-fertilisation that was, in a broader sense collaborative .. as well as competitive. -- These plays were not necessarily mere ciphers of the historical past or present. The Jew of Malta far from endorses the behaviour of the besieged Christians in 1565. It is remarkable for its resistance to the Malta narrative in Christian accounts where the Turkish defeat (like at Lepanto) was celebrated. - While the Tamburlaine plays and their spin-offs called attention to Turkish tyranny and the Ottoman threat, the move away from the Marlovian aesthetic signalled a more ironic approach. Thus in Henry V, Henry's proposal to Katherine that they should produce a son to recapture Constantinople (an anachronism) is undercut by the ambiguous, "Shall we not?" For the audience a deeper irony is available - "the original phrase 'to go to Constantinople to take the Turk by the beard' became a repository for vacuous ideals, a phrase that could only be rehearsed with an increasing sense of self-satire" -- online journal html

Before his coronation, as he announces his intention to invade France, and as he proposes marriage to Katharine, Henry V invokes the specter of a Turkish double. These moments in Shakespeare’s play punctuate the major political transitions of his reign; moreover, they condense a pattern of thought vital to these plays, one that concerns the constitution of English nationalist discourse from the often recalcitrant materials of a Christian political imaginary. In the 16thC, Christendom remained the object of powerful emotional cathexis, but the forms of allegiance and action it authorized were in dispute. Henry redirects the energies that once coalesced around the political and communal ideal of a Christian commonwealth to the commonwealth of England. But as Henry invokes the Turk as his opposite, he also suggests his resemblance to that figure. In this, Henry V opens up some serious questions about the “political theology” of the nation. In revealing the constitution of national community as a translated theology, Shakespeare suggests that this is a troubled process. Recent accounts of early modern nationalism have tended to downplay or forget Christendom as a transnational space of belonging both instrumental to the nation and still in competition with it. The strange relations between “Harry” and “Amurath” evoked in 2 Henry IV and Henry V are the traces of a wider struggle between Christendom and the nation as theopolitical spaces, a struggle that takes place in significant measure over the figure of Muslim difference. -- lots of cites to English constitutional history links to national identity (eg Pocock & critics), Blumenberg and Schmitt debates -- paywall