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 *