'Drunk or sober, king or soldier, none will be excluded'Sensual, profound, delighted, wise, Hafez's poems have enchanted their readers for more than 600 years.
A fascinating surviving chronicle from 12th-century England which holds a unique and terrible place in the history of anti-SemitismThe Life and Passion of William of Norwich gives a remarkable insight into life in a medieval cathedral city, brilliantly capturing the everyday concerns of ordinary people and focussing on the miraculous cures carried out at a shrine.
A major new interpretation of how one of the great figures of Christian history came to write the greatest of all autobiographiesAugustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most.
Mostly written between 1070 and 1080, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, the prayers and meditations of Anselm of Aosta created a tradition of intimate, intensely personal devotional works written in subtle and theologically daring prose.
'Perpetua shouted out with joy as the sword pierced her, for she wanted to taste some of the pain and she even guided the hesitant hand of the trainee gladiator towards her own throat'Lives of Roman Christian Women is a unique collection of letters and documents from the third to the fifth centuries, celebrating Christian women from across the Roman Empire.
From Thomas Becket's early life as a merchant's son and his time as the Archbishop of Canterbury to his assassination in the Cathedral itself, this enlightening book brings to life a colossal figure of British history.
Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods.
After the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of south-west France in 1208, a Spanish monk - later canonized as St Dominic - took up the cudgels by establishing a kind of secret police to ferret out heresy - thus began the infamous Inquisition.
'Across the language barrier Dawood captures the thunder and poetry of the original' The TimesThe Koran is universally accepted by Muslims to be the infallible Word of God as first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel nearly fourteen hundred years ago.
One of the most influential - and best loved - spiritual autobiographies'I beg anyone who reads this account to bear in mind, for the love of the Lord, how wicked my life has been'Born in the Castilian town of vila in 1515, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation when she was twenty-one.
'Give me chastity and continence, but not yet'The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting world-views.
The writings in this volume cast a glimmer of light upon the emerging traditions and organization of the infant church, during an otherwise little-known period of its development.
This selection of writings from the sixth and seventh century AD provides a powerful insight into the early history of the Christian Church in England and Ireland.
Founding father of the famous monastery on the island of Iona, a site of pilgrimage ever since his death in 597, St Columba was born into one of the ruling families in Ireland at a time of immense expansion for the Irish Church.
Founder of a monastery at Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples, in the sixth century, St Benedict intended his Rule to be a practical guide to Christian monastic life.
Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) caught the popular imagination with his vast and enterprising comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, which in its third edition numbered 12 volumes.
A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscapeStarting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion.
A new history of Christian-Muslim relations in the Carolingian period that provides a fresh account of events by drawing on Arabic as well as western sourcesIn the year 802, an elephant arrived at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen, sent as a gift by the ?
*Note: Lead Like It Matters is a completely revised and updated version of the book previously published as It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It.
Enduring lessons from the desert soundscapes that shaped the Christian monastic traditionFor the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God.
An exploration of early modern accounts of sickness and disability-and what they tell us about our own approach to bodily differenceIn our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution.
The untold story of how the Arabic Qur'an became the English KoranFor millions of Muslims, the Qur'an is sacred only in Arabic, the original Arabic in which it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century; to many Arab and non-Arab believers alike, the book literally defies translation.
How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing ZionismBy the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism.
A unique history of the Hebrew language from biblical times to the modern Jewish stateThis book explores the extraordinary hold that Hebrew has had on Jews and Christians, who have invested it with a symbolic power far beyond that of any other language in history.
