Christendom

Heather’s sweeping and engaging history of the making of Christendom over a thousand years is full of reinterpretations and new insights… his approach makes for a startlingly fresh look at a familiar story, a non-triumphalist history of the triumph of Christianity, and his book is all the more powerful for it. – Jane Shaw * Financial Times *Heather casts his eye across the whole medieval period as he unfolds a fascinating story about a religion in a surprisingly precarious position. – Dan Jones * Sunday Times *It is more pressing than ever to understand how exactly Christianity came to dominate in Europe. Heather’s account cuts through the myth of an innately Christian, culturally monolithic Europe… [and] sheds light on the mechanics of state coercion and intermittent violence which led to the birth of Christendom. It’s no light reading - but there’s enough drama to make it a page-turner. – Eleanor Myerson * Spectator *A brilliant exercise in disenchantment … superb storytelling … Heather more than delivers. While Christendom is fabulously rich in telling detail, Heather is always mindful of the big picture. The book is at once captivating and profound. – Costica Bradatan * Literary Review *One of the many delights of this weighty book is the abundance of little-heard but illuminating and intriguing stories that he weaves into the narrative to show how Christianity endlessly reinvented itself to maintain a winning formula …. the tale of how Christianity, from unlikely beginnings, became one of the great mass-member institutions of the world is expertly and entertainingly told. – Peter Stanford * Daily Telegraph *A colossal book written by a colossus in the field … [The] range of interests makes Heather uniquely qualified to tell a grand story that has often been told before, but seldom with such a sense of freshness and the unexpected … To read Christendom from cover to cover (an exercise I would advise, if only to savor its Gibbonian sweep and control of infinitely varied evidence) is to experience the whoosh of a roller coaster as Christianity passes from one form to another against the background of an ever-wider Europe – Peter Brown * The New York Review of Books *

Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at King’s College, London. His many books include The Fall of the Roman Empire, Empires and Barbarians- Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe, The Restoration of Rome and, most recently, Rome Resurgent.