Books by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China. How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments. 'A stunning tour de force' Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

Edition of all surviving letters originating from long-vanished Suffolk mansion, an important part of the correspondence of one of Tudor and Stuart England's most powerful families.

New scrutinies of the most important political and religious debates of the post-Reformation period.

The reformation which engulfed England and Europe in the sixteenth century was one of the most highly-charged, bloody and transformative periods in their history, and has remained one of the most contested. This book explores a turbulent and endlessly fascinating era.

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.

The 650th anniversary of the foundation of Wingfield College was the occasion for a special two-day symposium marking the culmination of a three-year UEA-funded research project into the college and castle. The building projects of the late medieval aristocracy focused on their homes and the monasteries, churches or chantry foundations under their patronage where their family were buried and commemorated. This commemoration allowed a visual celebration of their achievements, status and lineage, the scale and prestige of which reflected on the fortunes of the family as a whole. Wingfield is explored in the context of both the actual building of the castle, chantry chapel and the college, and that of the symbolic function of these as a demonstration ion of aristocratic status. The contributions to this book examine many topics which have hitherto been neglected, such as the archaeology of the castle, which had never been excavated, the complex history of the college's architecture, and the detailed study of the monuments in the church. The latest techniques are used to reconstruct the college and castle, with a DVD to demonstrate these. And the context of the family and its fortunes are explored in chapters on the place of the de la Poles in fifteenth century history, as soldiers, administrators and potential claimants to the throne.

This study throws new light on the relationship between the counties and central government, and on the changing political and religious views of both gentry and people at the time of the English Reformation. Winner of the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, acknowledged master of the big picture in Christian history, unravels a polyphony of silences from the history of Christianity and beyond. He considers the surprisingly mixed attitudes of Judaism to silence, Jewish and Christian borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine, and the silences which were a feature of Jesus's brief ministry and witness. Besides prayer and mystical contemplation, there are shame and evasion; careless and purposeful forgetting. Many deliberate silences are revealed: the forgetting of histories which were not useful to later Church authorities (such as the leadership roles of women among the first Christians), or the constant problems which Christianity has faced in dealing honestly with sexuality. Behind all this is the silence of God; and in a deeply personal final chapter, MacCulloch brings a message of optimism for those who still seek God beyond the clamorous noise of over-confident certainties.

This collection of essays by leading scholars and researchers in early Tudor studies provides an up-to-date discussion of the politics, policy and piety of Henry VIII's reign.