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In this book accompanying his BBC radio series, the former director of the British Museum explores the role of shared beliefs in the life of human communities around the globe. Rather than focusing on religious doctrine, he concentrates on practices, objects and places, tracing how societies from the Ice Age onwards have used stories and rituals to mark their identity and strengthen cohesion: ‘for in deciding how we live with our gods we also decide how to live with each other’. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

This introduction to the history of the Bible answers some of the questions most commonly asked about its origins and transmission: when and by whom were the different books written, how were texts chosen for inclusion, and how have they been passed on through the ages? The authors also bring out the adventure and intrigue of a tale which includes such significant archaeological discoveries as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sir Laurence Gomme’s original idea for a county history was realized by the publisher Herbert Arthur Doubleday, who not only gained Queen Victoria’s consent that the History should bear her name, but secured a special arrangement with the Public Record Office. The first volume (Hampshire I) appeared in 1900 and new volumes continue to be published, now much improved and updated, but remaining comprehensive, factual, reliable and unbiased reference works, based on original research. A religious history of the county from Roman times to the Reformation (1560) is followed by a chapter on Celtic aspects of medieval Christianity in Cornwall by Oliver Padel, and a survey of religious houses after 1066. Off-mint. No jacket.

Ripon in the 14th and 15th centuries was an important ecclesiastical and commercial centre: its market was promoted by the Archbishops of York, who owned the land; and work at Ripon Minster, the church of St Wilfrid, attracted craftsmen such as carpenters and plumbers from surrounding areas as far as York. Stephen Werronen analyses the relationship between religion and society in the parish from 1380 to 1522, looking in particular at the cult of St Wilfrid. No jacket.

Selina O’Grady examines the concept of tolerance – ‘that highest of liberal political virtues’ – through the histories of Islam and Christianity, from the time when the Roman Empire became Christian to the genocides of the 20th century. As she traces the two religions’ changing attitudes to religious minorities she asks whether tolerance is enough to bring today’s post-Christian and Islamic worlds together, or whether something deeper is needed.

Both a religious order and a private army, the Templars were answerable only to the Pope and dominated the politics of the Middle East during the tumultuous age of the Crusades. This book traces the history and changing fortunes of the order, from its foundation in 1119 to its suppression amid accusations of heresy less than two centuries later.

Anthony Le Donne’s introduction to Jesus’ life and legacy is in five parts, looking at his existence as historical figure, and his place in early literature, in the pre-modern imagination, among modern intelligentsia, and in the popular culture of today.

With 14 essays discussing topics including Thomas Hobbes’s atheism, definitions of blasphemy in the 18th century, and William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), this volume argues that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the contentious terms ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’ involved fine distinctions that have not always been preserved by later scholars.

Over the course of the 16th century, the House of Guise rose from a provincial power to a dominant political player in France and other parts of Europe. In nine essays, this volume explores the most prominent of the Dukes of Guise, particularly Henry of Lorraine, and the ambition that drove them to make claims on the thrones of Jerusalem and Naples.

Illuminating tensions that lurked within the religious culture of a remote and unremarkable town, this book examines the events that provoked the friary trial of Körmend, when the Augustinian friars of the town were accused of drunkenness, sexual abuse and liturgical negligence, then driven out and replaced by Franciscans in the name of ‘cloister reform’.

Aimed at non-specialist readers, this collection of surveys introduces the diversity and complexity of religious currents across pre-Christian Europe. The contributors examine archaeological and written evidence to analyse beliefs and rituals ranging from the Palaeolithic to the early modern period.

In the late 12th century the chancery clerk, envoy and chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo wrote a series of historical works that gained considerable and lasting popularity. This volume of nine essays provides a systematic survey of the wide readership enjoyed by Godfrey’s works and the influence of his political ideas during the late Middle Ages.

Published in the Catholic Christendom, 1600–1700 series, Smith’s study explores the promotion of one type of fidelity – fealty to the sovereign – in Bourbon France, and the clash of that fealty with the religious creeds of the Lazarists, the followers of Vincent de Paul, in the years after his death in 1660.

Taking a sceptical approach to the traditional story of Islam’s origins, Holland surveys the world of late antiquity, which saw ‘the establishment, for the first time in history, of various brands of monotheism as state religions’. He explores how patterns of thought were altered as an Arab superpower replaced the Roman and Persian empires, with far-reaching consequences for world history.

In How Do We Look, Mary Beard explores how the human body was portrayed in the earliest art, including the colossal Olmec heads of Central America, Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese warriors and Praxiteles’ Aphrodite in ancient Greece. In Part Two, The Eye of Faith she visits Buddhist temples, Christian art and architecture, and Islamic mosques and calligraphy to explore the relationship between art and religion and the endeavour to make the divine visible.

The Catholic priest Father Allan MacDonald (1859–1905) was not only a much-loved champion of his Hebridean parishioners on Eriskay, but also an accomplished Gaelic poet and one of Scotland's greatest collectors of folklore. Hutchinson's beautifully written book recounts the life and work of this remarkable man against the richly evoked backdrop of an island landscape where myth and spirituality entwine.

In this book accompanying his BBC radio series, the former director of the British Museum explores the role of shared beliefs in the life of human communities around the globe. Rather than focusing on religious doctrine, he concentrates on practices, objects and places, tracing how societies from the Ice Age onwards have used stories and rituals to mark their identity and strengthen cohesion: ‘for in deciding how we live with our gods we also decide how to live with each other’.

Annotated with dates and scriptural references, the 24 maps in this visual guide track the journeys of Biblical characters and indicate the locations of key events, from the time of Noah’s flood to the death of St Paul.

In 1517 Martin Luther, the ‘indispensable firestarter’, launched his 95 theses protesting the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church. From the upheaval of the Reformation that followed, Alec Ryrie’s fast-paced and engaging history traces five centuries of Protestantism, across the globe and across a vast diversity of sects and movements, to Pentecostalism in the 20th century and the situation today. ‘We cannot understand the modern age,’ writes Ryrie, ‘without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity’.

The son of a famous soldier, Andrew Festing spent nine years in the army and another twelve at Sotheby's auction house before becoming a professional painter in 1981. He quickly established himself as a leading portraitist and has completed commissions of prominent figures in politics, the Church and the Royal Family, including the Queen. This exploration of his oeuvre gives an account of his life and influences, discusses his meticulous methods and includes reproductions of over 150 of his works.

Described by Lord Denning as ‘the greatest constitutional document of all times’, Magna Carta is widely seen as a guarantor of individual rights and freedom from tyranny. But how is a charter forced on a medieval king by his barons relevant today? This comprehensive, accessible and richly illustrated volume explains its origins, how it has been interpreted through the centuries, and the inspiration it provides to those wishing to build democratic societies across the world.

This volume on the revival of women’s ministry in the 19th-century Church of England presents documents from a variety of unpublished sources that show how the Deaconess Movement posed a threat to the gender order of Victorian society by creating new areas of activity and roles of authority outside the domestic sphere. Prominent among the institutions and individuals discussed are the North London Deaconess Institute and the first head deaconess, Elizabeth Ferard (1825–1883). No jacket.

One of Methodism’s earliest traditions was the ‘band meeting’, at which a small group of people came together and confessed their sins, in order to grow in holiness and to foster community. Drawing extensively on personal accounts by those who attended them, Watson explains why Wesley considered regular band meetings so important, shows how they grew from a synthesis of Anglican and Moravian concepts of piety and suggests why they declined during the 19th century.

Amid the dangers of the modern Middle East, adherents of the obscure Mandaean religion still practise weekly river baptisms, following the example of their most important prophet, John the Baptist. Smith investigates the history of the Mandaeans, asking whether their mysterious sect could be the last survival of ancient Gnosticism, as they claim. He also considers their links to other ancient religions, their possible influence on the Knights Templar and their belief that Jesus himself was an apostate Mandaean.

An influential work since its first publication in 1984, The Commerce of the Sacred now appears in a new, updated edition. It combines approaches from the history of religions and social anthropology to investigate the practices and influence of Jews who lived in the Greco-Roman world outside Palestine. Without rabbinic control, Lightstone argues, they developed their own beliefs, such as those involving prayers at dead martyrs' tombs, and thereby helped blur the boundaries between Jews and Christians.

'It is more profitable to study the history of the imperfect masters', writes Magre, than those 'so near the gods that they have been enveloped in the clouds of the empyrean'. His compendium of attainable spiritual heroes includes an anonymous master of the Albigenses who succumbs under torture, the Templars, the alchemist Nicolas Flamel and Madame Blavatsky. Translated from the French.