Lower than the Angels

Magisterial … In Lower than the Angels, Diarmaid MacCulloch offers a history of sex and Christianity that is both confronting and reassuring in its detail and complexity, taking biblical scholarship and theological development seriously at the same time as insisting on the historian’s independence. A thrilling read. – Lucy Winkett * Financial Times *A compelling and encyclopedic survey of how Christianity makes sense of sexual desire. MacCulloch is an ideal guide in tracing this story… [he] writes with such liveliness and energy that the reader hardly notices the length of the book or the comprehensiveness of its field of reference … His narrative is dispassionate, sometimes quietly and wittily deflationary, careful and generous, its own moral compass neither intrusive nor indecipherable…. He is judicious and convincing. – Rowan Williams * Sunday Telegraph *Immensely broad in scope, incredibly detailed and enormously readable, with no small measure of humour… This is a book which repays the reader time and again. The overarching narrative is fascinating ad the treatment of the subject is magisterial. – William Naphy * Literary Review *Incendiary … a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage). [It] offers a fabulous catalogue of the babel of voices in the Bible and the ways that they have been interpreted, invariably for political purposes, down the centuries. – Tim Adams * Observer *Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in Lower than the Angels [how] many biblical pronouncements on sexuality are ambiguous, if not downright contradictory … by showing us the bigger picture, MacCulloch allows the reader to fully appreciate the complexity and diversity of Christian experience, and to identify recurrent themes. Those who are offended by the loose morals of contemporary Western society will surely be further angered by this thought-provoking and compassionate book. – Katherine Harvey * Engelsberg Ideas *Wry and original… As a compendious and rigorous guide to the histories that underlie current church debates on sex and gender, this work is invaluable. – Penelope Cowell Doe * Church Times *[A] magisterial account of three millennia of recorded history, written in both cheerfully irreverent and briskly expository style … Encompassing everything from marriage to masturbation, from contraception to the immaculate conception, Lower than the Angels is an exhaustive study. – Pratinav Anil * Sunday Times *Compendious * Economist *Lower Than The Angels [is] an intellectual history of Christian ideas about sex [and] an argument for more flexibility and responsiveness in Christian proclamations on gender and sexuality. Across three thousand years we have the pleasure of MacCulloch’s erudite company as he explains how Christian thinkers have met the problem of desire. [He] emphasizes the contingency and ingenuity of Christian responses to the difficulties of human sexuality and family life [and] show[s] that so much of what many fundamentalist Christians today understand as ancient, deep-rooted practices are, in fact, relatively shallow … an epic tale – Erin Maglaque * New York Review of Books *

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, and Fellow of St Cross College and of Campion Hall. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation- Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (2004) won the Wolfson Prize and the British Academy Prize. A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC television series, was awarded the Cundill and Hessell-Tiltman Prizes. He was knighted in 2012 and was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2022.