Eamon Duffy, whose opinion of this book will not be lightly disputed, remarks on its jacket that 'everyone who reads it will learn things they didn't know.' Most lay reviewers will think this an understatement; yet the scope of the project, its distance from anything that might be described as parochial, may persuade them that the records of Christianity, preserved and interpreted for the most part by assiduous priests and scholars, deserve a few moments of their attention. Consider, as one instance among a thousand (I'll come back to them), the decisions or 'Definitions' of the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). Even if we have never heard of them they are valid today. And the words of St Augustine, issuing eloquently from North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, would be debated as matters of life and death more than a thousand years later in Calvin's Geneva and in the American colonies - even in some modern Nonconformist churches.

LRB 25 March 2010 | PDF Download