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 November 2025 list, chosen by our staff, with excerpts from the publishers’ blurbs.
Leslie Brubaker and Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, eds. Processions: Urban Ritual in Byzantium and Neighboring Lands, 2025
Processions of all kinds—military, civic, religious, and more—were hallmarks of the ancient and medieval world. Yet urban processions in Byzantine culture have never been thoroughly studied, even though there were as many as two processions a week in Constantinople alone, often featuring eminent individuals like the emperor and the patriarch, but also less prominent people, like the teams who decorated the streets. In an introduction and ten chapters, Processions: Urban Ritual in Byzantium and Neighboring Lands examines a millennium of medieval processions through analysis of texts, artifacts, and images.
Byzantium did not, of course, exist in a vacuum. Byzantine processions are here set alongside those occurring at the borders of the Byzantine world: the Latin West, the Islamic East, and, of course, Jerusalem, the center of the Mediterranean’s sacred world. This comparative approach lets us better see how the Byzantines operated in a complex global network defined by local contexts, how the Byzantines positioned themselves within this network, and the nature of the Byzantine legacy to their Islamic, Catholic, and Orthodox inheritors.
David Salter, St Francis and Cultural Memory: The Franciscans and English National Identity from Chaucer to the Gothic, 2025
St Francis and Cultural Memory explores central aspects of English national, spiritual, and broader cultural identity through a detailed yet accessible analysis of a familiar figure: the Franciscan Friar. Covering more than four hundred years from the late fourteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and taking in a wide variety of different literary and artistic forms, the book charts the changing face of the Franciscan friar in the English literary imagination, and examines how developments within this evolving tradition were both shaped by, and have helped to shape, wider debates within English culture about the relationship between religious and national identity, and the past and the present.
Central to this analysis is the notion of cultural memory. At the time of its suppression in the 1530s, the Franciscan Order was too deeply assimilated into the social fabric of England either to be forgotten, or to be credibly labelled an entirely alien presence, despite the best efforts of Protestant polemicists to do so. Rather, the effect of the Reformation was to supress, but not completely to erase, memories of English Franciscans. The Catholic history that English Protestantism sought to deny was prone to return in unexpected and often distorted and disturbing forms, so that in the centuries following the Reformation, Franciscans came to haunt the imagination of English writers and artists. Appearing in a wide variety of literary and artistic guises, these ghostly Franciscans functioned as spectres of a national past which English Protestantism tried to disavow, but which it was unable entirely to destroy.
Franciscan friars appear in the work of some of the most popular and influential writers and artists from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, reflecting the centrality of the Order to ongoing debates within English culture about religion and national identity. The book discusses in detail the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, William Hogarth, Edward Gibbon, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis. It explores the individual responses of these writers and artists to the Franciscans and their legacy, and also highlights the ways in which this shared interest in the Order reveals hitherto unacknowledged connections between their work.
Bénédicte Sère, Translated by Caroline Wazer, Inventing the Church: The Pull of the Past in Ecclesial Politics, 2025.
Why is the official narrative of the history of the Catholic Church so discordant with the archival sources of the Middle Ages? From the fifteenth century down to the present day, the Church has constructed an identity and a past at odds with what the records show—expanding the authority and power of the papacy in ways that have striking broader political implications.
This audacious and nuanced book explores how the Church has repeatedly invented and reinvented itself through a constant back-and-forth between narratives of the Middle Ages and modernity. Bénédicte Sère excavates and traces this history through seven pivotal concepts in long-standing debates over papal power and the nature of the Church. Providing critical readings of the medieval sources on which later positions have been based, she chronicles how the Church has officially interpreted—and misinterpreted—its own past in order to serve the needs of the present and to create a narrative for posterity.
Drawing on a wide range of classic and recent works published in French, German, Italian, and English, this book offers a bold reinterpretation of Church history and historiography. Inventing the Church also speaks more broadly to questions concerning the interpretation of foundational documents, the uses of history, and the ways institutions interact with their own pasts.
Yun Zhou, The Woman’s Messenger: Evangelical Literature and the Missionary Movement in Republican China, 2025
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, China underwent tumultuous times—from nation building and the New Culture Movement to the Japanese occupation and the renunciations accompanying the Korean War. As Yun Zhou argues, this transformative period cannot be fully understood without considering the evolving role of women and Christianity in Chinese society.
At the turn of the twentieth century, American missionary women established Nü duo (The Woman’s Messenger), a Christian women’s magazine based in Shanghai whose publication spanned four decades of changing values around feminine virtue. Tracing the magazine’s evolution across its three editors, Zhou shows how growing intellectualism among the magazine’s staff and readership challenged a homogenous ideal of womanhood. While Nü duo began under the editorship of a white American missionary championing traditional domestic values, the Chinese editors who went on to lead the magazine in subsequent decades broadened the boundaries of Christian gender ethics, emphasizing matters of indigenous agency, leftist thinking, theodicy, and personal spiritual elevation. Zhou shows how the magazine’s trajectory points to a subtle yet profound process wherein the women involved—navigating ideas concerning God, gender, nation, warfare, and even the details of everyday life—became agents of historical change rather than mere recipients of it.
Drawing from a wide range of sources from China and the West, this book makes an important contribution to the fields of women’s studies, print culture, modern Chinese history, and world Christianity.
Tanner E. Walker, Constructing the Human in the Hebrew Bible, 2025
While animals in the Hebrew Bible have received significant scholarly attention, the category of the human has remained underexamined. Constructing the Human in the Hebrew Bible addresses this gap by interrogating how biblical authors construct, reinforce, and challenge notions of humanness, focusing on the implications for identity, ethics, and ideological frameworks.
Drawing on critical theories from thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Giorgio Agamben, Tanner E. Walker reveals how biblical texts actively negotiate the boundaries between human and animal, divine and mortal, and self and other. Through case studies on creation narratives, divine-human hybrids like Samson, and depictions of Israel as subjugated animals under imperial rule, Walker highlights how biblical conceptions of humanness are deeply tied to questions of power, otherness, and the hierarchical organization of the world. He also situates the Hebrew Bible within the broader ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions, exploring how biblical ideas of humanness intersect with Mesopotamian and Assyrian sources. Blending biblical studies, ancient history, and critical theory, this book provides a nuanced understanding of how ancient texts grapple with the complexities of identity.
A vital resource for scholars and students of biblical studies, religious studies, and ancient history, this book challenges long-held assumptions about identity and categorization and contributes to broader conversations about how societies construct and impose categories—insights that remain profoundly relevant in contemporary debates about identity, power, and the boundaries of the human.
Jordan Chad, Christmas in Yiddish Tradition: The Untold Story, 2025
This book seeks to answer a perplexing question: Why were Christmas traditions once transmitted in Yiddish, a language exclusive to non-Christians?
Back in Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews traditionally let loose on Christmas Eve with feasting, drinking, dancing, and gambling. Scholars have previously assumed this Christmas Eve vacation from Torah study to have been some sort of antagonistic counterculture to Christians celebrating Christmas. But Christmas in Yiddish Tradition reveals that the Christmas traditions transmitted in Yiddish were very similar to those transmitted in other European languages. Drawing on a wealth of documents, Jordan Chad argues that rather than European Jews being antagonistic towards Christmas, their Christmas Eve celebrations were exactly what they looked like: Jews celebrating Christmas.
The volume offers the surprising argument that while Jews never celebrated the birth of Jesus, Christmas did not actually become the strictly Christian holiday that it is today until the period when Jews migrated to the New World. Prior to that time, Jewish midwinter traditions developed as variants of midwinter traditions that were widespread across neighboring European communities. Christmas in Yiddish Tradition recounts how Jews and Christians over the past millennium each awaited supernatural visits from diverse versions of Santa Claus. They only came to fully Christianize their concept of midwinter in modern times, at which point the place of "Christmas" in the Jewish collective memory evolved from the year's jolliest vacation to its most dangerous disturbance.
The volume uncovers the story of how Christmas once flourished in a language exclusive to non-Christians—and how modern Jews and Christians ultimately came to forget about the time when they celebrated Christmas in tandem.
Max Perry Mueller, Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West, 2025
The Native American leader Wakara (ca. 1815–1855) was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West, famed as a fierce warrior, a merciless trader of Indian slaves, and history’s greatest horse thief.
In Wakara’s America, historian Max Perry Mueller illuminates Wakara’s complex and sometimes paradoxical story, revealing a man who both helped build the settler American West and defended Native sovereignty. Wakara was baptized a Mormon and allied with Mormon settlers against other Indians to seize large parts of modern-day Utah. Yet a pan-tribal uprising against the Mormons that now bears Wakara’s name stalled and even temporarily reversed colonial expansion. Through diplomacy and through violence, Wakara oversaw the establishment of settlements, built new trade routes, and helped create the boundaries that still define the region.
Drawing together deep archival research with Native oral histories, archaeology, geology, and ecology, Wakara’s America offers an innovative new vision of the history of the American West with Native people at its center. It serves as a powerful testament to Wakara’s legacy, which endures in his story, in his tribal descendants, and in their stewardship of their ancestral lands today.
Angela F. Murphy, Jermain Wesley Loguen: Defiant Fugitive, 2025
Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813–1872) was a fugitive from slavery, an abolitionist, and a minister, teacher, and political activist. He worked alongside Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and his home in Syracuse, New York, was among the most publicized Underground Railroad stations in the northern states. Loguen’s political commitments in the years before the Civil War were carried out at great personal risk, for he had liberated himself from slavery in Tennessee and was in constant danger of being captured and reenslaved under the Fugitive Slave Law. Defiantly, however, he refused to purchase his own freedom, an act that he believed would have legitimized the rights of slaveholders. In addition to aiding fellow fugitives from slavery, Loguen worked tirelessly to promote Black equality and uplift throughout upstate New York and Canada. After Emancipation, he extended his work to aid freedpeople in the South and to advocate for Black equality on a national scale.
In this engaging study, Angela F. Murphy follows Loguen from his early years through his transformation into one of the brightest stars in the constellation of abolitionists and reformers in New York.
William J. Schultz, Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City, 2025
University of North Carolina Press
In the years after World War II, American evangelicals flocked to the once-sleepy mountain town of Colorado Springs. Drawn by cheap property, beautiful scenery, and the encouragement of civic leaders who saw religion as a path to prosperity, evangelicals planted new churches and built religious nonprofits with a global reach. They preached their message in churches and schools, even in the United States Air Force Academy. Their efforts transformed the city into what some called the “Evangelical Vatican” and others dubbed “Jesus Springs.” But in the early 1990s, as the evangelical movement shifted its focus from saving souls to securing political and economic power, relations between the movement and the local community fractured. Today the city faces the prospect of reinvention, grappling with the challenges of America’s fast-changing religious landscape.
Jesus Springs reveals the power and influence of American evangelicalism within the nation’s spiritual economy. Linking the Cold War and the culture wars, William J. Schultz tracks how a deluge of defense spending helped Colorado Springs become the organizational heart of American evangelicalism. This story, taking place as evangelicalism transformed from a primarily religious movement into the social and political force we know today, illuminates the movement’s potential impact as its participants seek ever-greater power.
William P. Collins, Millennialism, Millerites, and Prophecy in Bahá’í Discourse, 2025
This book explores the role of millennialism, the Millerites, and prophecy in the historical development of the Bahá’í faith, especially in North America. The author demonstrates the importance of the Bahá’í religion to millennialism studies and its connection to certain Protestant American and Shia Islamic modes of thought. Bahá’ís see two millennial visions on far-separated continents, within different religious milieux, and from contrasting social climates, as spiritually and prophetically linked: the Millerites who expected the return of Christ in 1844 CE and Shia Muslims who expected the Mahdí/Qá’im/Twelfth Imam in 1260 AH/1844 CE. The chapters in this volume reflect on theories about millennialist movements, the continuum from catastrophic to progressive millennialism, Bahá’í interpretations of biblical prophecy, and Bahá’í efforts to build the “Kingdom of God on earth” under a systematic divine plan. The book highlights the maturation of the Bahá’í community toward a focus on process and a capacity to deal with both catastrophe and progress. It provides scholars of religion with a detailed study of the trajectory in Bahá’í millennial ideas.
Teresa Witcombe, On the Edges of Christendom: Maurice of Burgos and the Church and Culture of Medieval Castile, 2025
On the Edges of Christendom explores the life and thought of Bishop Maurice of Burgos, and through him, what it meant to live on the border between the Latin West and Islamic al-Andalus in the thirteenth century. Bishop of Burgos from 1213 until his death in 1238, Maurice was a highly ambitious figure: a scholar, reformer, ambassador, and judge, and the founder of the Gothic cathedral of Burgos. He was deeply preoccupied with the Islamic frontier to his south, and preached crusade against al-Andalus. He was also interested in Islamic philosophy, and was an active member of the intellectual milieu of Toledo, where he patronised the translation of texts from Arabic into Latin, including the Qur’ān. Drawing on archival research in Latin, Arabic, and Spanish, as well as material culture, architecture, and inscriptions, this book traces Maurice’s extraordinary career within the Church and society of medieval Castile. In so doing, it reveals the reception of some of the key intellectual, theological, and cultural developments of the thirteenth century on the edges of the medieval Christian world.
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.