Religion : History

This volume examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilize binary gender itself. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. more...

Price: $115.00

The mystical, ecstatic religions of the Greco-Roman culture, direct threats to the newer Judeo-Christian movements, were obliterated. Here is a thorough description of the Eleusian mysteries, and traces of cultural conflicts at the root of Kosher law and more...

Price: $26.95

This book looks at the last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, conventionally seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. The book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous, and that it was during these years that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined. more...

Price: $44.00

"The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six-hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.". The twelfth century birthed a new and sinister brand of sanctioned terror, an international network of secret police and courts, an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to seek out anyone regarded as an enemy, and a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands. The original agents of the Inquisition—priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners—were deputized by the Church and their worst excesses were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in a holy war against heresy that became the obsession of Christendom. Yet the first rumblings of Western civilization's great engine of persecution provided no indication of the ultimate scope and influence of the inquisitorial toolkit and how the crimes of the first inquisitors were perpetrated again and again into the twentieth century and beyond. Despite the importance of this legacy, the history of the Inquisition remains a subject that has largely been overlooked by general historians. With The Grand Inquisitor's Manual , national bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch delivers a sweeping and provocative history that explores how the Inquisition was honed to perfection and brought to bear on an ever-widening circle of victims more...

Price: $19.95

This volume consists of a general introduction to Greek sacred law and a collection of inscriptions from mainland Greece, the colonies, and the islands (except Cos) published since the late 1960s. more...

Price: $163.00