To remain unconsumed by consumer society—this was the goal, pursued through a world of subtle and practical means, that beckoned throughout the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life. The second volume of the work delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol develop a social history of “making do” based on microhistories that move from the private s...

More than two decades have passed since Chicago published the first volume of this groundbreaking work in the Religion and Postmodernism series. It quickly became influential across a wide range of disciplines and helped to make the tools of poststructuralist thought available to religious studies and theology, especially in the areas of late medieval and early modern mysticism.Though the second volume remained in fragments at the time of his death, Michel de Certeau had the foresi...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Is the classic, accepted view of the life of Christ in some way incomplete? The authors of The Messianic Legacy present a provocative and meticulously researched look at Christ and the history of Christianity.“Enough to seriously challenge many traditional beliefs, if not alter them.”—Los Angeles Times Book ReviewExplosive, thought-provoking, fiercely compelling, Holy Blood, Holy Gr...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.The Reformation was a long struggle of ideas between the established Catholic Church and the questioning of faith brought about by the Renaissance in Western Europe. Started by Martin Luther in 1517, religious dissidence spread across Europe throughout the sixteenth century, causing wars, migration and disunity. By 1648 Henry VIII’s desire for divorce led him to break with the Catholic Church in Rome and form the Church of Engla...

An early English Protestant, John Foxe fled from England to Strasbourg, France, when Mary Tudor became queen. There, he occupied himself with a Latin history of the Christian persecutions and he printed, in Latin, the first part of his history of the persecution of Protestant reformers. First published under the title “Actes and Monuments” in 1563, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” is an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants and p...

The village remains a quintessential and much-loved treasure of the English countryside. This rural idyll has inspired generations of great poets, novelists and artists including the likes of Constable, Hardy, Wordsworth, as well as providing the picturesque setting for modern TV series such as Lark Rise to Candleford and Cranford. The English Village celebrates all that is unique and loved about a typical village - the pub, the green, the school, the church, the...

This is a complete English translation of the famous Ethiopian work The Kebra Nagast - The Glory of the Kings of Ethiopia. Complied by a Coptic priest in the 6th century AD from much older material, The Kebra Nagast is a remarkable mixture of legends and traditions, some historical and some of a mythic quality, derived from the Old Testament and the later Rabbinic writings and from Egyptian (both pagan and Christian), Arabian and Ethiopian sources. The principle theme is the descent of the...

What does it mean to be Metis? How do the Metis understand their world, and how do family, community, and location shape their consciousness? Such questions inform this collection of essays on the northwestern North American people of mixed European and Native ancestry who emerged in the seventeenth century as a distinct culture. Volume editors Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall go beyond the concern with race and ethnicity that takes center stage in most discussions ...

A remarkable medieval woman's life and the earliest surviving autobiography in English, now updated with new materialThe story of the eventful life of Margery Kempe - medieval wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the ...

Coming from a society where women were barred from serious writing and teaching, Julian, an anchorite of the great medieval city of Norwich, nevertheless uses her womanlines and the English vernacular of the day to describe a series of revelations which she received from God in the year 1373. She identifies the female nature of Christ's suffering and the motherhood of God, using images from domestic daily life, emphasizing the homeliness of God's love. She writes in a lively and unpretenti...

'In the midst of life we are in death' The words of the Book of Common Prayer have permeated deep into the English language all over the world. For nearly 500 years, and for countless people, it has provided a background fanfare for a marriage or a funeral march at a burial. Yet this familiarity also hides a violent and controversial history. When it was first produced the Book of Common Prayer provoked riots and rebellion, and it was banned before being translated into a host of global la...

The Reformation transformed Europe, and left an indelible mark on the modern world. It began as an argument about what Christians needed to do to be saved, but rapidly engulfed society in a series of fundamental changes. This Very Short Introduction provides a lively and up-to-date guide to the process. It explains doctrinal debates in a clear and non-technical way, but is equally concerned to demonstrate the effects the Reformation had on politics, society, art, and minorities. P...