Monthly Updates on Recent Books in the History of Christianity
To raise awareness of recent books in the history of Christianity, the editorial staff of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture highlights each month a list of 10-15 books in diverse periods and geographical regions that we hope will be of interest to our members. We include here below the 53rd monthly list, chosen by our staff, with excerpts from the publishers’ blurbs.
Matthew J Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People. 2025
Over several decades beginning in 1620, tens of thousands of devout English colonists known as Puritans came to America. They believed that bringing Christianity to the natives would liberate them from darkness. Daniel Gookin, Massachusetts's missionary superintendent, called such efforts a "war of the Lord," a war in which Christ would deliver captive souls from Satan's bondage.
When Puritan soldiers slaughtered hundreds of indigenous men, women, and children at Fort Mystic in 1637, during the Pequot War, they believed they were doing God's will. The same was true during King Philip's War, perhaps the bloodiest war in American history. The Puritan clergyman Increase Mather described this conflict, too, as a "war of the Lord," a war in which God was judging the enemies of his people.
Matthew J. Tuininga argues that these two "wars" are inextricably linked. Puritan Christianity, he shows, shaped both the spiritual and military conquests of New England from beginning to end. It is not only that the people who did these things happened to be Christians; it is that Christianity was the framework they used to guide, interpret, and defend every major act of peace or war. They made sincere efforts to treat Natives according to Christian principles of love and justice as they understood them, and their sustained missionary efforts demonstrate how serious they were about saving native souls. Yet they appealed to Christianity just as confidently when they subjugated, enslaved, or killed native peoples in the name of justice. A mission they saw as spiritual, peaceful, benevolent, and just devolved into a military conquest that was virtually genocidal.
Róisín Watson, The Beauty of Belief: Decorating the Württemberg Church During the Reformation. 2025
The Beauty of Belief sheds new light on Lutheran relationships with ecclesiastical decoration in southwest Germany following the Duchy of Württemberg’s Reformation in 1534. Based on extensive original archival research and engagement with surviving images and objects, Róisín Watson compellingly demonstrates how Lutherans moved away from initial acts of iconoclasm and towards embracing the possibilities of the religious image in their devotional routines. She explores the interactions of Württemberg rulers, pastors, and congregations with their ecclesiastical spaces across the political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In doing so, this book tells not only the story of the visual culture of the Reformation, but an account of Württemberg’s Reformation itself.
Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Robert A. Ventresca, Melodie H. Eichbauer, and Miles Pattenden, eds. The Cambridge History of the Papacy. Volume II: The Governance of the Church. 2025
This volume engages with the centrality of the popes within the Catholic Church and the claim of papal authority as it was exercised through the institution's various governing instruments. Addressing the history of the papacy in the longue durée, it highlights developments and the differences between the first and second millennium of the papacy. The chapters bring nuance to older historiographical models of papal supremacy, focusing on how apostolic primacy was contested and re-negotiated, and how the contours of power relationships shifted between center and periphery. The volume draws attention to questions about papal supremacy across time, place, and transnational lines; the function of law in the exercise of papal authority; the governance of the church in the form of the Curia, synods, and regional and ecumenical councils; the governance of the Papal States; the management of finances and church-state relations; and the relationship between papal temporal and spiritual authority.
Matthias Maser, Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, and Geoffrey K. Martin, eds. Canon Law and Christian Societies Between Christianity and Islam. An Arabic Canon Collection From al-Andalus and its Transcultural Contexts. 2024
The unique Arabic version of the Iberian canon law code 'Collectio Hispana', preserved in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of the Royal Library of El Escorial, has been deemed “the most distinguished and characteristic” work of medieval Andalusi Christian writing. It represents an exceptional source witness to the internal legal organisation of Christian communities in Muslim-dominated al-Andalus as well as to their acculturation to Islamicate environments. Yet, the Arabic collection has received only little scholarly attention so far. This volume presents the results of a recent interdisciplinary research project on the Arabic canon law manuscript, flanked by contributions from neigbouring fields of research that allow for a comparative assessment of the substantial new findings. The individual chapters in this volume address issues such as the origins of the Arabic law code and its sole transmitting manuscript, its language and translation strategies, its source value for both the persistence and transformation of ecclesiastical institutions after the Muslim conquest, or the law code's position in the judicial practice of al-Andalus. The volume brings together the scholarly expertise of distinguished specialists in a broad range of disciplines, e.g. history, Arabic and Latin philology, medieval palaeography and codicology, archaeology, coptology, theology and history of law.
Susan Juster, A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America. 2025
University of North Carolina Press
From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring themselves from the Protestant authorities. Their strategies of concealment, deception, and misdirection frustrated colonial census takers, and their presence has likewise eluded historians of religion, who have portrayed Catholics as isolated dots in an otherwise vast Protestant expanse.
Pushing against this long-standing narrative, Susan Juster provides the first comprehensive look at the lived experience of Catholics—whether Irish, African, French, or English—in colonial America. She reveals a vibrant community that, although often forced to conceal itself, maintained a rich sacramental life saturated with traditional devotional objects and structured by familiar rituals. As Juster shows, the unique pressures of colonial existence forced Catholics to adapt and transform these religious practices. By following the faithful into their homes and private chapels as they married, christened infants, buried loved ones, and prayed for their souls, Juster uncovers a confluence of European, African, and Indigenous spiritual traditions produced by American colonialism.
Ines G. Zupanov, Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries: Catholic Histories and Fictions. 2025
Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th century onward. Since Portuguese imperialism was unable to justify itself without invoking otherworldly intervention, Catholic missionaries provided the vocabulary and narrative of global salvation. Each chapter in this volume explores a range of enchantment techniques used by missionaries, encompassing historical prose, poetry, images, and translations, woven through with emotions and wrapped in illocutionary force. Catholic missionaries in India wrote from and about the soft belly of tropical colonialism with certainty about the triumph of Christianity. Understanding the subterranean bond between history and fiction is at the heart of this book.
Mihai Ţipău, Sylvester of Antioch: Life and Achievements of an 18th-Century Christian Orthodox Patriarch. 2025
In 1724, Sylvester, a native of the island of Cyprus, was elected Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and All the East. For more than four decades, he endeavored to preserve the legacy of one of the earliest Christian Churches in the Levant. He faced major challenges because of the ever changing balance of power between the Latin Church and its missionaries, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the French and English interests in the Levant, and the central and local Ottoman authorities. In his efforts to provide church books for the Arab Orthodox Christians, Sylvester was helped by rulers of the Romanian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia. He printed a number of books in Jassy and Bucharest and opened an Arabic press in Beirut. Alongside his patriarchal duties, Sylvester was also an accomplished icon painter. His works, in the Post-Byzantine Greek style of the 18th century, are preserved in Syrian and Lebanese churches, as well as elsewhere. Their study reveals just another aspect of his complex activity. The book presents for the first time in English the biography and achievements of Sylvester of Antioch, based on a wide range of contemporary Greek, Arabic and Romanian historical sources.
Ann W. Astell, The Saint’s Life and the Senses of Scripture: Hagiography as Exegesis. 2025
University of Notre Dame Press
Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping forms of exempla and vita. Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible—God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. During the medieval period, a sense of dual authorship between God and the cooperating saint developed, paralleling the Scholastic impulse to assign greater agency to the human writers of scripture. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor.
Thomas Albert Howard, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History. 2025
A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.
Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Unforgivable: An Abusive Priest and the Church That Sent Him Abroad. 2025
University of California Press
Clerical sexual abuse is as global as the Roman Catholic Church, with bishops moving credibly accused priests not simply between parishes but also across international borders. Unforgivable follows the movement of one such perpetrator from the Great Plains of central Minnesota to the Indigenous highlands of Guatemala, where this priest had access to children and even raised one as his own.
Although Father David Roney is at the center of this particular story, author Kevin Lewis O'Neill offers ample evidence that offshoring priests is a common practice. These maneuvers and the callous indifference of the Church—even once caught red-handed—reveal the limits of justice. They also lay bare the disturbing fact that the scale of clerical sexual abuse is far bigger than anyone has yet considered. Rigorously researched and viscerally important, this book raises urgent questions about holding the Catholic Church accountable.
Maya Maskarinec, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome. 2025
University of Pennsylvania Press
Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors.
Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth.
Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.
Finally, for staying up-to-date on the latest titles in all fields, we recommend regularly perusing New Books Network and its "New Books in Christian Studies” page. These pages are updated regularly.