Book Review
Feminine Threads (Women in the tapestry of Christian History) by Diana Lynn Severance.
This is a brilliant book. You want to read this book because you want to learn a bit about a few of the vast number of wonderful women who have been shaping the church over the last two thousand years.
Thank you SO much to the person who gave it to me. I’ve been looking for a book that does this for ages and even though this one has been published for over a decade I’ve not seen it. At the end of each year’s Church History Lecturing (ie about April time for me), I ask the students what do you think we missed and to a man (sic) they say: the women.
So over the years I’ve adjusted the course as best I can to fit in St Olympia, Katherine von Bora, Corrie ten Boom, Hild, Hildegard, and so on I’ll stop there.
The book is actually a fairly predictable straightforward telling of how the gospel came west. All the usual things are there like Persecutions, Constantine, Monasteries, Reformation, and so on. But what is different is that this book tells the history through the women. And it does it well.
Its Not an easy read if, for example, you don’t know why Clovis was important because that’s going to slow you down as you read about why his wife Clothilda was important. It was a time of ‘Flirt to Convert’ and a time of ‘IF the Leader follows that God then so should you’. Hence the book is particularly good on Queen Bertha of Kent, and her daughter, and granddaughters.
I didn’t notice much on the Desert Mothers, nor on the Pentecostal movement, but the breadth that it covers is brilliant. I will be recommending this to my students. They will love it possibly because they will have already read Essential Christianity by Miranda Threlfall Holmes.
Christianity at the Crossroads (How the Second century shaped the future of the Church) by Michael Kruger.
Absolutely my favourite book I have read over the summer. You want to read this book because you want to learn about how the rag tag misfits of Apostles and Disciples managed to hold onto the faith and begin to change the world through the 100s and as far as the start of the 300s.
I bought this book five years ago and its been sitting neglected on my shelf as if with its weepy big eyes looking at me pleading ‘Read me, Read me!’. So at last I have indulged. It’s a terribly bland title for such a fabulous book. Kruger would have been better off just sticking with the dull but does the job sub-heading.
You don’t need to read it. A some of my students ought to read it (it might help them with a couple of essay titles). I think it is very readable but it is also quite detailed. You might not know much about Marcion, Montanists, Gnostics or Ebionites but here in this book he unpacks these early heresies. He explores the rise of the single bishop (note the bible always has it plural episkopoi). He is alas a cessationist: presuming that the role of the prophet was meant for the first and not needed for the second century. What he meant was that the title role of Prophet was edged out as the church settled into society and the rise of Elders and Presbyters rather took over most roles. He didn’t mean that the gift of prophecy at work in the Church to encourage and bless was gone.
Kruger explores how we got our bibles; how our churches initially made up of illiterate came to have plenty of well educated; how in the days before Councils it kept a grip on what’s gospel, what’s fan fiction and what’s unhelpful in early Christian literature and beliefs.
Its my favourite bit of Church history because this is the muddled period where Christians are still trying to work out who they are and how they fit into the world. The World doesn’t know whether to persecute Christians or not though that starts sporadically. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this new faith, so people rose up to write Apologies, explanations, about why Christians are good citizens who pay their taxes and care for the elderly. I was particularly glad to find a lengthy section on Peregrinus. This is a satire written by Lucian about a clever pagan who inveigles his way into the Church and interprets their scriptures so well that when he is imprisoned for being a Christian finds himself well visited and well fed by the stupid, superstitious, overly kind followers of Jesus.
If these stones could talk: The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland through twenty buildings by Peter Stanford.
This is a really good book and does what it says on the tin. You want to read this book because you’d like to know something of how the Gospel came to this land.
It took me a little while to get into this book because I didn’t quite get the genre and finally I realised that you don’t really need to read the first couple of pages, or the last couple of pages, of each chapter. Cleverly the author takes you to a different church with each chapter. Stanford explains a little of the church before getting into the meat of the chapter about how this place is relevant to understanding the history of Christian faith here. Glastonbury Abbey, St Just-in-Roseland in Cornwall, and St Martin’s Canterbury to name a few.
There’s a particularly good section where the Scots are seen as the trigger for the English Civil War because they didn’t take kindly to the imposition of an English (smells of popery) Prayer Book from Archbishop Laud. And a very good section on Ireland. Most church history books, my course included, doesn’t even go there. But it would seem that being literally a separate piece of land, the Irish didn’t respond as encouragingly as England had done to Henry 8th’s Reformation, nor much to Oliver Cromwell’s insistence on puritanism.
Also very good was the section on the Hanoverians (who weren’t that fussed about the Divine Right of kings). This led to a problem for the Church who’d been busy giving this to kings for centuries and so started the Slumber of the CofE. Thank God for the Methodists. But it also got me thinking about how when religion and faith aren’t especially relevant to the kings that that will filter down and the Church will need to find again its raison d’etre. Something we didn’t see much until the Clapham Sect and the Tractarians a century later.
The book ends blandly. Both the last chapter and then the epilogue. I’d blame Covid probably but it has a depressing tone and a lack of the role of Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement in the faith of the Churches in England.
Still of the three on this blog, this is the most readable.
(Photo is of Lucy’s little sister, husband, dog, and us at Well’s Cathedral)