The Christian World: A Social and Cultural History of Christianity

Citation

Rolfe, P. (2004), "The Christian World: A Social and Cultural History of Christianity", Library Review, Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 68-69. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530410514847

When it first appeared, in 1981, reviewers of The Christian World stressed that it was no mere coffee table book, as if this might somehow detract from its worthiness. Yet its “sumptuous format” and “lavish illustration” need no apology. The attractiveness of this book increases the likelihood of it being picked up, browsed, read and enjoyed by the non‐academic or non‐specialist reader for whom the history of Christianity might previously have held no interest.

In just over 300 pages – an introduction and 12 chapters – the Editor and authors cover nearly 2,000 years of “the impact of the Christian religion on the lives and cultures of the peoples who … entered the Christian fold”. They begin with “Christianity in the Roman Empire”, and “The rise of Christian art”, and proceed to “The conversion of the barbarian peoples”. Subsequent chapters cover “The Eastern church”, “Medieval Christendom”, “Popular religious movements in the Middle Ages”, the Reformation and Puritanism. From the Counter‐Reformation and the Baroque, there is a jump to the nineteenth century, and “Christianity and industrial society”, though I would have expected something on the Enlightenment. “Religion at the grass‐roots” on the idiosyncratic American experience, and “Christianity in the contemporary world”, bring us to the late twentieth century.

The essays are readable yet erudite, and there is much here to stimulate curiosity. Unavoidably, many ideas are not fully explained or explored – I found myself wondering why “active meditation” is necessarily to be preferred to “passive contemplation” (p. 228) and how to distinguish between the two. If the appetite for further study is whetted, there is an extensive “Select bibliography”, but even if you explore the subject no further than this one book, read it with a general encyclopaedia and a dictionary to hand.

This is of necessity a survey, albeit a panoramic one, and as is perhaps inevitable in a compilation, there is an occasional jarring or puzzling note. In the account of the lives and inner lives of the typical Puritans, John and Thomasine Winthrop, the claim (p. 206) that English women of that time would plant cloves is mystifying – possibly a misprint for chives. Statements such as, “the Russians never understood the concept of the rule of law” and “to the Russians, as to many other Orientals, the law is little more than the means by which the government justifies its actions” (p. 120), sound dated and blimpish.

One would not expect a work on the social and cultural history of Christianity to need much updating, yet in the course of the two decades since first publication, we have seen in Northern Ireland and the Balkans the continuation of conflicts which ostensibly derive from the Reformation and the Eastern Schism, the slightly baffling phenomenon that ideas which in old Europe would be regarded as verging on eccentricity (e.g. creationism), are almost mainstream in the USA, and quite recently it is reported that the President of the USA decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq – in a struggle against religious zealotry – because God told him to. These would seem to be striking manifestations of the social and cultural impact of Christianity, and I look forward to their treatment in an updated edition.