How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors. Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth. Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians' handling of the saints and the saints' lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.

Whether you are a pastor, teacher, or layperson, now you can study the Bible in easy-to-read sections that emphasize personal application as well as biblical meaning. Developed from Dr. Wiersbe's popular "Be" series of Bible study books, this commentary carefully unpacks all of the New Testament. The Wiersbe Bible Commentary New Testament offers you: Dr. Wiersbe's trustworthy insights on the entire New Testaments New Biblical images, maps, and charts Introductions and outlines for each book of the Bible Clear, readable text that's free of academic jargon Let one of the most beloved and respected Bible teachers of our time guide you verse-by-verse through the Scriptures. It's the trusted reference you'll love to read.

Written by a former Roman Catholic of eighteen years and former candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, Dr. Todd Baker objectively and honestly examines the grandiose claims of the Papacy and the Roman Catholic Church in the critical light of Scripture and the evidence of history to show where Rome has greatly erred. This multi- volume work provides a controversial overview on the basic doctrines distinctive of Roman Catholicism so the open Catholic can learn how these beliefs, practices, and traditions of Rome contradict Scripture and do not have the support of a consistent, uniform history from the days of Jesus, the apostles, and the first three centuries of the early church and on. With over 1 billion adherents to the Roman Catholic Church, it is incumbent for the Bible believer to know the difference between the real Gospel of Scripture versus the Gospel of Rome and how they are not one and the same Gospel in the end. In a day of man-pleasing, ecumenical compromise with Rome, this book is sorely needed to remind the Protestant church that the real differences between Rome and the Bible have not changed since the Reformation, and must be reiterated and defended today on the exclusive ground of Scripture alone being the supreme authority in faith and practice for every Christian believer! Dr. Todd D. Baker is president of Brit Hadashah Ministries and Pastor of Shalom, Shalom Messianic Congregation in Dallas, Texas. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biblical studies, a Master of Theology degree from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Apologetics from Trinity Seminary under the auspices of Liverpool University at Liverpool, England. He is the staff theologian and writer for Zola Levitt Ministries and has appeared on the television program Zola Levitt Presents several times. With his extensive experience in Jewish evangelism, he conducts Gospel outreaches to Israel three times a year.

It was far from inevitable that Rome would emerge as the spiritual center of Western Christianity in the early Middle Ages. After the move of the Empire's capital to Constantinople in the fourth century and the Gothic Wars in the sixth century, Rome was gradually depleted physically, economically, and politically. How then, asks Maya Maskarinec, did this exhausted city, with limited Christian presence, transform over the course of the sixth through ninth centuries into a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of sanctity? Conventional narratives explain the rise of Christian Rome as resulting from an increasingly powerful papacy. In City of Saints, Maskarinec looks outward, to examine how Rome interacted with the wider Mediterranean world in the Byzantine period. During the early Middle Ages, the city imported dozens of saints and their legends, naturalized them, and physically layered their cults onto the city's imperial and sacred topography. Maskarinec documents Rome's spectacular physical transformation, drawing on church architecture, frescoes, mosaics, inscriptions, Greek and Latin hagiographical texts, and less-studied documents that attest to the commemoration of these foreign saints. These sources reveal a vibrant plurality of voices—Byzantine administrators, refugees, aristocrats, monks, pilgrims, and others—who shaped a distinctly Roman version of Christianity. City of Saints extends its analysis to the end of the ninth century, when the city's ties to the Byzantine world weakened. Rome's political and economic orbits moved toward the Carolingian world, where the saints' cults circulated, valorizing Rome's burgeoning claims as a microcosm of the "universal" Christian church.

From inside the Vatican, the book that became a modern classic on sainthood in the Catholic Church. Working from church documents, Kenneth Woodward shows how saint-makers decide who is worthy of the church's highest honor. He describes the investigations into lives of candidates, explains how claims for miracles are approved or rejected, and reveals the role politics -- papal and secular -- plays in the ultimate decision. From his examination of such controversial candidates as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who became a nun and was gassed at Auschwitz, to his insights into the changes Pope John Paul II has instituted, Woodward opens the door on a 2,000-year-old tradition.

Rome was one of the major pilgrim destinations in the middle ages. The belief that certain objects and places were a focus of holiness where pilgrims could come closer to God had a long history in Christian tradition; in the case of Rome, the tradition developed around two of the city's most important martyrs, Christ's apostles Peter and Paul. So strong were the city's associations with these apostles that pilgrimage to Rome was often referred to as pilgrimage t̀o the threshold of the apostles'. Debra Birch conveys a vivid picture of the world of the medieval pilgrim to Rome - the Romipetae, or R̀ome-seekers' - covering all aspects of their journey, and their life in the city itself. --Back cover.

Within Christian tradition the veneration of relics has happened quite naturally. From the first few moments of Christian history, as the three Marys looked on with surprise upon the empty tomb of Christ, to the most recent martyr, who in their own way suffers and joins him or herself to Christ's passion, the church has always shown a great desire to provide special dignity to the dead and proper veneration and respect for their remains. The Liturgy in a special way unites the most august celebration of the Eucharist with the memorials of the saints. This not only reflects the eternal union that Christ desires for each of us in heaven but it also expresses the incredible love that God has for his creation. This work attempts to tap into this marvelous reality. By focusing primarily upon the saints of the Roman Catholic Liturgical Calendar it is hoped that the pilgrim may in a unique way participate in the Divine Liturgy by visiting the shrines of the saints on their feast days.

Lying at Europe's remote western edge, Ireland long has been seen as having an artistic heritage that owes little to influences beyond its borders. This publication, the first to focus on Irish art from the eighth century AD to the end of the sixteenth century, challenges the idea that the best-known Irish monuments of that period-the high crosses, the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the round towers-reflect isolated, insular traditions. Seventeen essays examine the iconography, history, and structure of these familiar works, as well as a number of previously unpublished pieces, and demonstrate that they do have a place in the main currents of European art. While this book reveals unexpected links between Ireland, Late-Antique Italy, the Byzantine Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons, its center is always the artistic culture of Ireland itself. It includes new research on the Sheela-na-gigs, often thought to be merely erotic sculptures; on the larger cultural meanings of the Tuam Market Cross and its nineteenth-century re-erection; and on late-medieval Irish stone crosses and metalwork. The emphasis on later monuments makes this one of the first volumes to deal with Irish art after the Norman invasion. The contributors are Cormac Bourke, Mildred Budny, Tessa Garton, Peter Harbison, Jane Hawkes, Colum Hourihane, Catherine E. Karkov, Heather King, Susanne McNab, Raghnall Floinn, Emmanuelle Pirotte, Roger Stalley, Kees Veelenturf, Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk, Niamh Whitfield, Maggie McEnchroe Williams, and Susan Youngs.