Four decades ago, two friends sat down at a spiritual message board. What started as simple curiosity turned into a historical adventure – a bridge between two worlds! Thus began an amazing journey with the delivery of new poems, stories, and recollections signed by such names from yesterday as Emily Dickinson, John F. Kennedy, Elvis, Edgar Allan Poe, Socrates, Shakespeare, Freud, and Jimi Hendrix. Almost forty years ago two young friends – August da Silva and Eric Marshall – sat down to t...

Johannes Gutenberg is famous as the inventor of Europe’s first typographic printing method, and his life and legacy have long fascinated a wide audience. Due to scant and vague fifteenth-century documentation, however, Gutenberg’s career has long been obscured by derivative storytelling, competing agendas and scholarly guesswork. This new biography removes these barriers to retell his story directly, through his pioneering work: schoolbooks, pamphlets, indulgences, broadsides and, notably,...

A new edition of the "brilliantly original and highly sophisticated" study of saint worship after the fall of the Roman Empire ( Library Journal).In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the...

"An indispensable point of departure for anyone interested in the cult of the saints in the Middle Ages." —Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of BooksFrom its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant...

In 1450, all Europe's books were handcopied and amounted to only a few thousand. By 1500 they were printed, and numbered in their millions. The invention of one man - Johann Gutenberg - had caused a revolution. Printing by movable type was a discovery waiting to happen.Born in 1400 in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg struggled against a background of plague and religious upheaval to bring his remarkable invention to light. His story is full of paradox: his ambition was to reunite all Chri...

" . . . lively and intellectually stimulating . . . " —Speculum"Wunderli . . . has lucidly reconstructed a controversial conflict in 15th-century south-central Germany. . . . this engaging narrative takes off from Hans Behem—the peasant who claimed to see the Virgin and gained followers until crushed by the established church—to explore larger forces at work in Germany on the eve of the Reformation. . . Wunderli also attempts to sort out the violent conflict that ensued and Hans's ...

'Gripping ... An exquisite conversation between two people who know each other, like each other, and have mutual respect for one another' - Catholic TimesSince resigning from the papacy in 2013, the first Pope in over 700 years to do so, Pope Benedict has lived quietly in a convent in the Vatican gardens in Rome. He has devoted himself to a life of prayer and study and has vowed to remain silent, until now.So much controversy still surrounds Pope B...

From the author of the acclaimed biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, new perspectives on how Luther and others crafted his larger-than-life imageMartin Luther was a controversial figure during his lifetime, eliciting strong emotions in friends and enemies alike, and his outsized persona has left an indelible mark on the world today. Living I Was Your Plague explores how Luther carefully crafted his own image and how he has been portraye...

A revolutionary look at Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the birth of publishing, on the eve of the Reformation’s 500th anniversaryWhen Martin Luther posted his “theses” on the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, protesting corrupt practices, he was virtually unknown. Within months, his ideas spread across Germany, then all of Europe; within years, their author was not just famous, but infamous, responsible for catalyzing the violent wave of religious reform ...

**An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts.Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize.A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick!**Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader in...

A new departure in Penguin Classics: a book containing one of the greatest of all Renaissance woodcut sequences - Holbein's bravura danse macabreOne of Holbein's first great triumphs, The Dance of Death is an incomparable sequence of tiny woodcuts showing the folly of human greed and pride, with each image packed with drama, wit and horror as a skeleton mocks and terrifies everyone from the emperor to a ploughman. Taking full advantage of the new ...