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 55th monthly list, chosen by our staff, with excerpts from the publishers’ blurbs.
Ian Forrest, Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church: A New History. 2025
Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church asks a deceptively simple question: How did the governance of the medieval institutional church remain exclusively male, despite plentiful evidence of women being as capable and devout as men? The remarkable endurance of an all-male clergy is an important element of medieval church government—one that is frequently taken for granted in the historiography—and is connected to another overlooked feature of episcopal authority: the strategies that bishops used to secure the compliance of a relatively autonomous clergy. As Ian Forrest shows, bishops kept their clergy in check through normative standards of masculinity that necessarily disqualified women from leadership roles.
Everywhere in the medieval church were women who had the capacity, the resources, and often the ambition to take part in governance, from abbesses to priests' servants, mothers, sisters, and unofficial wives. Bringing together evidence of female activity at the margins of the institutional church, Forrest argues that the male monopoly on formal power was haunted by female capability and aspiration at every turn. Drawing on case studies from the English diocesan clergy between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he explores how women's involvement in governance was rendered unthinkable through the very discursive strategies that bishops used to control their male clergy. In doing so, Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church tells an integrated history that explains how both the exclusion of women and the inclusion of men underpin a rigidly gendered system of religious governance.
Paul P. Mariani, China's Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival. 2025
During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state sought to eradicate religious life throughout the country. But by 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping cautiously embraced the revival of religion. At the same time, in Rome, the newly elected Pope John Paul II made a point of renewing outreach to China. Paul P. Mariani tracks the fate of Chinese Catholicism in the wake of these transformative leadership changes, focusing on the influential Catholic community in Shanghai.
Even as Chinese Catholicism came back to life in the 1980s, the way forward was hardly an easy one. Earlier policies of the 1950s had fractured the Catholic community into a state-approved “patriotic” church that answered to the government and an underground church loyal to Rome. Even after the Cultural Revolution, Mariani shows, this divide remained firmly intact. The resulting tensions were on vivid display in Shanghai, owing to the leadership of the Jesuit priest Louis Jin Luxian. Formerly a member of the underground church, Jin realigned with the state church during the revival and was consecrated bishop of Shanghai without papal approval in 1985. Bishop Jin used his position to revitalize the local Catholic community, but his cooperation with the party put him ever at odds with underground church leaders.
Sensitive to the ideals, compromises, and disappointments of Catholics on both sides of the rift, China’s Church Divided reveals how the community navigated the irreconcilable differences between a worldwide Church centered in Rome and a regime wary of foreign spiritual authority.
Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History. 2025
Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.
Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, ed. A Companion to Medieval Canonization Processes: New Contexts, Perspectives, and Comparisons. 2025
Canonizations, which officially proclaimed a person’s sanctity, were complex, embracing theological, judicial, social, and cultural aspects of medieval Christianity. The dossiers manifest the theological ponderings while also revealing the devotional practices, daily life, and troubles of those not learned in canon law or theology.
This volume offers tools for comprehending canonization processes by investigating their judicial background and structural elements, as well as devotional aspects reflected in the depositions. It approaches canonization processes in a three-fold way: as a phenomenon of the past, as a source material with methodological challenges, and as a specific field of historical studies. Furthermore, this volume engages in innovative methodological discussions and illuminates the state-of-the-art and topical new themes.
Deanna Ferree Womack, Re-inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia. 2025
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American Islamophobia would eventually take root. Re-inventing Islam explores the deep roots of this recent phenomenon, using gender as a lens and focusing specifically on the historical role of Protestant leaders and missionaries in transmitting ideas about Islam. Looking beyond typical studies of texts that male clergy and theologians wrote, this book identifies gendered discourses, images, and performances as key in Protestant portrayals of Islam. To understand the unique ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British missionaries shaped the ideas they inherited from the Reformation, Re-inventing Islam begins in the sixteenth century, long before any systematic Protestant attempt to evangelize Muslim societies. The four central chapters then turn to the modern missionary movement. Two chapters examine the gender discourses in missionary texts for adults and children, and two chapters explore the visual and material sources that missionaries used to shape their constituents’ ideas about and behavior toward Muslims. Each chapter sheds light on the role of women missionaries and their use of gender constructs to re-invent Islam through appropriation and adaptation of existing ideas about Muslims for new purposes—ultimately influencing American views of Muslims. Through more closely examining this history, identifying problematic legacies, and highlighting surprising instances of interfaith appreciation, in the end the book offers new pathways toward dialogue and Christian-Muslim understanding.
George M. Roure, Messianic and Utopian Influences on Imperial Spain: A Comparative Study in the Works of Tommaso Campanella and Pedro Fernández de Quirós. 2025
Roure draws a novel connection between Tommaso Campanella’s utopian ideas for Imperial Spain and Catholicism and Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós’ vision of an idyllic society and a mythical city of New Jerusalem in the antipodes.
The book presents newfound evidence suggesting Spain experimented with Messianism to secure their empire in the late Renaissance. The case is made that the Spanish monarchy contemplated Campanella’s Messianic ideas and sent Quirós to initiate them on the imagined Terra Australis Incognita. Campanella and Quirós shared idiosyncratic beliefs that by means of divine providence Spanish power would imminently transform the world, elevate humanity to a higher spiritual plane, dominate politics and religion, and prepare for the second coming. The work advances our understanding of previously unknown links amongst Campanella’s religious solutions for idealising temporal government, Quirós’s objective of a utopian society in the great south land, and Spain’s tentative experimentation with Messianism. It also permits the drawing of inferences on the possible rationale behind political messianism in the contemporary world.
This book is a valuable resource for scholars, students, researchers, and professionals interested in European and World History of the late Renaissance as well as those interested in the religious and political imperatives of Imperial Spain during the Habsburg period.
Nicholas Sheldon, The Philosophical Foundations of Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy and her Radical Metaphysics. 2025
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) is best known for founding the religion of Christian Science - an international institution which has extended beyond her lifetime and into the twenty-first century. Often labelled as fringe theology, rather than core philosophy, Eddy's work has remained on the peripheries of academia. Her unmitigated idealism, and occasionally nebulous style, have led to a reluctance to apply a philosophical rigour to her thinking. In The Philosophical Foundations of Christian Science, Nicholas Sheldon rediscovers her as a radical philosopher, one of many female philosophers of her time who, he contends, should no longer be underestimated. Carefully analysing her non-linear style in order to understand her internal system of thought, Sheldon resolves flaws within her argument, and draws out Christian Science's remarkable philosophical assertion: that it is not only illness and suffering which are unreal, but the entire physical realm. For Eddy, it is only the spiritual which remains.
Philip C. Almond, Noah and the Flood in Western Thought. 2025
In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe's Noah, in Darren Aronofsky's eponymous 2014 film, or other recent derivations, the biblical narrative has become a lightning rod for gathering environmental anxieties. However, Philip C. Almond's masterful exploration of Western cultural history uncovers a far more complex Noah than is commonly recognised: not just the father of humanity but also the first shipbuilder, navigator, zookeeper, farmer, grape grower, and wine maker. Noah's pivotal significance is revealed as much in his forgotten secular as in his religious receptions, and their major impact on such disciplines as geology, geography, biology, and zoology. While Noah's many interpretations over two millennia might seem to offer a common message of hope, the author's sober conclusion is that deliverance now lies not in divine but rather in human hands.
Mary Annette Pember, Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools. 2025
From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to “save the Indian” by way of assimilation. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the U.S. government, but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were a calculated attempt to dismantle tribes by pulling apart Native families. Children were beaten for speaking their Native languages; denied food, clothing, and comfort; and forced to work menial jobs in terrible conditions, all while utterly deprived of love and affection.
Ian Christopher Levy, With a Pure Conscience: Christian Liberty before the Reformation. 2025
Deeply committed to the formation of a just and sacred society, medieval theologians and canonists developed sophisticated arguments in defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. They did so based upon the conviction that each human person possesses an inalienable right to pursue his or her spiritual vocation and to inquire into the truth, provided that such pursuits were not deemed injurious to the commonweal. For this was an age in which all power, whether secular or sacred, was held to be exercised legitimately only insofar as it served the common good. Within these basic parameters there existed a domain of personal freedom guaranteed by natural and divine law that could not be infringed by either secular or ecclesiastical authority. Theologians and canonists did not countenance blind obedience to reigning powers nor did they permit Christians to stand idle in the face of manifest transgressions of sacred tradition, constitutional order, and fundamental human rights.
Such foundational principles as the sacred domain of conscience, freedom of intellectual inquiry, dissent from unjust authority, and inalienable personal rights had been carefully developed throughout the later Middle Ages, hence from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Contrary to the popular conception, therefore, the West did not need to wait for the Protestant Reformation, or the Enlightenment, for these values to take hold. In fact, the modern West may owe its greatest debt to the Middle Ages. With a Pure Conscience sheds further light on these matters in a variety of contexts, within and without the medieval university walls, and often amid momentous controversies. This was a robust intellectual culture that revered careful analysis and vigorous disputation in its relentless quest to understand and defend the truth as it could be ascertained through both reason and revelation.
Tine Van Osselaer, Apparition Fever: Observing the Virgin Mary in Belgium. 2025
McGill-Queen's University Press
In the early 1930s, a wave of Marian apparitions – cases in which visionaries reported seeing and receiving messages from the Virgin Mary – swept over Belgium. With over forty apparition sites and hundreds of visionaries, the Belgian apparitions, often attended by crowds of onlookers, were unrivalled in scope and complexity, and they confronted Catholics and others with a question: How do you decide what you believe?
Apparition Fever explores the Belgian apparitions from initial reports to the eventual recognition of two episodes in the 1940s. It shows how knowledge was formed at all levels – among the bystanders attending the sites, to the medical experts who studied the visionaries, and the clerical authorities who evaluated the authenticity of the apparitions. Tine Van Osselaer examines how these different perspectives converged and influenced each other, whose authority was accepted or challenged, and how the public character of the events affected their evaluation.
Apparition Fever reveals that the public setting of Marian apparitions and the religious enthusiasm they triggered are not novel challenges for the Catholic Church. On the contrary, they have heavily influenced the evaluation of apparitions since the early twentieth century.
Josh McMullen, The Glacier Priest: Father Bernard Hubbard and America’s Last Frontier. 2025
University of Notre Dame Press
In The Glacier Priest, Josh McMullen reveals the captivating life and legacy of Father Bernard R. Hubbard, a devout priest and a national celebrity, a rugged outdoorsman and a passionate promoter. From the late 1920s through the 1950s, the famous Glacier Priest and his dogs connected millions of Americans with the pioneering spirit of Alaska and his vision of the wilderness as the salvation of the nation’s soul. From celebrating Mass in the shadow of mighty Mount Katmai to mushing a dog sled team 1600 miles to five missionary bases, Hubbard’s stories of frontier adventure captured the hearts of Americans and paved the way toward Alaskan statehood and a greater integration of Catholics into American society.
The Glacier Priest seamlessly blends Father Hubbard’s rollicking adventures, the tensions underlying his larger-than-life persona, and the fascinating context that cements his legacy within American history.
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.