Five Fine History Books for Christmas
December 4, 2012
When students ask me what they need to do to become good church historians, I always answer -- Read history, any history, as long as it is well-written. So here are five recommendations of new books in 2012 which some might want to think about asking for as presents:
Best Sunday afternoon read in church history:
David B. Calhoun, Our Southern Zion: Old Columbia Seminary (1828-1927) (Banner of Truth). If you enjoyed Calhoun's history of old Princeton, you will enjoy this. If you have never read Calhoun before, I envy you your first experience of doing so. He writes with ease and grace, bringing to life the men and institutions of a bygone age in a manner which is reverent but never glutinously pious. I am not much of a fan of Southern Presbyterianism but this book has inspired me to go back to Thornwell with a more sympathetic eye.
Best new book to make it onto my syllabi:
Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale). I have been a fan of Wilken, a leading Roman Catholic historian of early Christianity, ever since I went to Princeton to hear him give a lecture on the secularisation of modern Christianity. When asked by a member of the audience -- and remember, this is Princeton we are talking about -- to give an example of selling out to the world, he declared (without taking a breath) 'Inclusive language translations of the Bible.' The place descended into uproar. Quite magnificent. This book is a superb tour of the first millennium of the Christian faith, written with his usual learning, wit and clarity. It will be on both my Ancient Church and Medieval syllabi from now on.
Best piece of sophisticated iconoclasm:
R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Harvard Belknap). A very scholarly analysis of how the church came to widespread and active persecution of those deemed heretics in the later Middle Ages. Moore looks at the social, economic, political and psychological contexts. Along the way, he argues for a wholesale dismantling of the way in which scholars have understood the Cathari. Maybe they were just a convenient figment of the ecclesiastical imagination.... This is quite brilliant. As it is not my field, I am not truly competent to judge whether its iconoclasm is entirely accurate but it seems compelling to me; and it will be interesting to see how the scholars who work on the Cathari respond.
Best book which opens up important areas for a non-specialist audience:
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Doubleday). Those who have read Applebaum's history of the Soviet gulag will know what to expect. This is painful reading. Those of us in the West typically see the Allied victory in World Ward II as a liberation; and for us it was. For many in the east, however, the Red Army proved to be no improvement on the Nazis. Here is a complicated tale told well, of Jews returning home to find their villages razed to the ground, of inmates freed from concentration camps and sent to the gulag, of countries being freed of occupying forces but then placed under a yoke of new slavery. The narrative focuses particularly on Poland, East Germany and Hungary. One of those books which simply confirms one's belief in total depravity and which also shows how fragile a thing is democracy.
Best fun, informative read:
Ruth Winstone (ed.), Events, Dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell (Profile). Undoubtedly the book I most enjoyed reading this year. History is always written in retrospect; here is a novel idea -- a history of Britain from the end of World War I to Cameron's election as Prime Minister, constructed entirely from the diaries of those involved. It is thus history as it happened, without the benefit of hindsight. Delightful and informative. If you have time to read just one mainstream book this year, make it this one.
Best Sunday afternoon read in church history:
David B. Calhoun, Our Southern Zion: Old Columbia Seminary (1828-1927) (Banner of Truth). If you enjoyed Calhoun's history of old Princeton, you will enjoy this. If you have never read Calhoun before, I envy you your first experience of doing so. He writes with ease and grace, bringing to life the men and institutions of a bygone age in a manner which is reverent but never glutinously pious. I am not much of a fan of Southern Presbyterianism but this book has inspired me to go back to Thornwell with a more sympathetic eye.
Best new book to make it onto my syllabi:
Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale). I have been a fan of Wilken, a leading Roman Catholic historian of early Christianity, ever since I went to Princeton to hear him give a lecture on the secularisation of modern Christianity. When asked by a member of the audience -- and remember, this is Princeton we are talking about -- to give an example of selling out to the world, he declared (without taking a breath) 'Inclusive language translations of the Bible.' The place descended into uproar. Quite magnificent. This book is a superb tour of the first millennium of the Christian faith, written with his usual learning, wit and clarity. It will be on both my Ancient Church and Medieval syllabi from now on.
Best piece of sophisticated iconoclasm:
R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Harvard Belknap). A very scholarly analysis of how the church came to widespread and active persecution of those deemed heretics in the later Middle Ages. Moore looks at the social, economic, political and psychological contexts. Along the way, he argues for a wholesale dismantling of the way in which scholars have understood the Cathari. Maybe they were just a convenient figment of the ecclesiastical imagination.... This is quite brilliant. As it is not my field, I am not truly competent to judge whether its iconoclasm is entirely accurate but it seems compelling to me; and it will be interesting to see how the scholars who work on the Cathari respond.
Best book which opens up important areas for a non-specialist audience:
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Doubleday). Those who have read Applebaum's history of the Soviet gulag will know what to expect. This is painful reading. Those of us in the West typically see the Allied victory in World Ward II as a liberation; and for us it was. For many in the east, however, the Red Army proved to be no improvement on the Nazis. Here is a complicated tale told well, of Jews returning home to find their villages razed to the ground, of inmates freed from concentration camps and sent to the gulag, of countries being freed of occupying forces but then placed under a yoke of new slavery. The narrative focuses particularly on Poland, East Germany and Hungary. One of those books which simply confirms one's belief in total depravity and which also shows how fragile a thing is democracy.
Best fun, informative read:
Ruth Winstone (ed.), Events, Dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell (Profile). Undoubtedly the book I most enjoyed reading this year. History is always written in retrospect; here is a novel idea -- a history of Britain from the end of World War I to Cameron's election as Prime Minister, constructed entirely from the diaries of those involved. It is thus history as it happened, without the benefit of hindsight. Delightful and informative. If you have time to read just one mainstream book this year, make it this one.
