• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Finding Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
• 1. Compiling Catherine: The Visionary Woman, Stephen Maconi, and the Carthusian Audience
• 2. William Flete, English Spirituality, and Catherine of Siena
• 3. Catherine Excerpted: Reading the Miscellany
• 4. The Orcherd of Syon: How to Read in the Convent
• 5. Catherine in Print: Lay Audiences and Reading Hagiography
• Conclusion - Reforming Reading: Catherine of Siena in an Age of Reform
• Appendix A: Literary Ancestry Chart Appendix B: Catherine Texts in England
• Notes Bibliography Index .
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Fruit of the Orchard sheds light on how Catherine of Siena served as a visible and widespread representative of English piety becoming a part of the devotional landscape of the period. By analyzing a variety of texts, including monastic and lay, complete and excerpted, shared and private, author Jennifer N. Brown considers how the visionary prophet and author was used to demonstrate orthodoxy, subversion, and heresy. Tracing the book tradition of Catherine of Siena, as well as investigating the circulation of manuscripts, Brown explores how the various perceptions of the Italian saint were reshaped and understood by an English readership. By examining the practice of devotional reading, she reveals how this sacred exercise changed through a period of increased literacy, the rise of the printing press, and religious turmoil.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Finding Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
• 1. Compiling Catherine: The Visionary Woman, Stephen Maconi, and the Carthusian Audience
• 2. William Flete, English Spirituality, and Catherine of Siena
• 3. Catherine Excerpted: Reading the Miscellany
• 4. The Orcherd of Syon: How to Read in the Convent
• 5. Catherine in Print: Lay Audiences and Reading Hagiography
• Conclusion - Reforming Reading: Catherine of Siena in an Age of Reform
• Appendix A: Literary Ancestry Chart Appendix B: Catherine Texts in England
• Notes Bibliography Index .
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Fruit of the Orchard sheds light on how Catherine of Siena served as a visible and widespread representative of English piety becoming a part of the devotional landscape of the period. By analyzing a variety of texts, including monastic and lay, complete and excerpted, shared and private, author Jennifer N. Brown considers how the visionary prophet and author was used to demonstrate orthodoxy, subversion, and heresy. Tracing the book tradition of Catherine of Siena, as well as investigating the circulation of manuscripts, Brown explores how the various perceptions of the Italian saint were reshaped and understood by an English readership. By examining the practice of devotional reading, she reveals how this sacred exercise changed through a period of increased literacy, the rise of the printing press, and religious turmoil.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

New Statesman's Best Books of the Year, 2018 Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year, 2018 We plan, as the old proverb says, and God laughs. But most of us don't find it all that funny when things go wrong. Most of us want love, a nice home, good work, and happy children. Many of us grew up with parents who made these things look relatively easy and assumed we would get them, too. So what do you do if you don't? What do you do when you feel you've messed it all up and your friends seem to be doing just fine? For Christina Patterson, it was her job as a journalist that kept her going through the ups and downs of life. And then she lost that, too. Dreaming of revenge and irritated by self-help books, she decided to do the kind of interviews she had never done before. The resulting conversations are surprising, touching and often funny. There's Ken, the first person to be publicly fired from a FTSE-100 board. There's Winston, who fell through a ceiling onto a purple coffin. There's Louise, whose baby was seriously ill, but who still worried about being fat. And through it all, there's Christina, eating far too many crisps as she tries to pick up the pieces of her life. The Art of Not Falling Apart is a joyous, moving and sometimes shockingly honest celebration of life as an adventure, one where you ditch your expectations, raise a glass and prepare for a rocky ride.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

An incredibly moving picture book biography of the man behind the hymn "Amazing Grace" and the living legacy of the song Caldecott Honor-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford and award-winning illustrator Frank Morrison. One stormy night at sea, a wayward man named John Newton feared for his life. In his darkest hour he fell to his knees and prayed--and somehow the battered ship survived the storm. Grateful, he changed his ways and became a minister, yet he still owned a slave ship. But in time, empathy touched his heart. A changed man, he used his powerful words to help end slavery in England. Those words became the hymn "Amazing Grace, " a song that has lifted the spirit and given comfort across time and all over the world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Stuart Mill observed in his Autobiography that he was a rare case in nineteenth-century Britain because he had not lost his religion but never had any. He was a freethinker from beginning to end. What is not often realized, however, is that Mill's life was nevertheless impinged upon by religion at every turn. This is true both of the close relationships that shaped him and of his own, internal thoughts. Mill was a religious sceptic, but not the kind of person which that term usually conjures up. The unexpected presence and prominence of spirituality is not only there in Mill's late, startling essay, 'Theism', in which he makes the case for hope in God and in Christ. It is everywhere-in his immediate family, his best friends, and his vision for the future. It is even there in such a seemingly unlikely place as his Logic, which repeatedly addresses religious themes. John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life is a biography which follows one of Britain's most well-respected intellectuals through all of the key moments in his life from falling in love to sitting in Parliament and beyond. It also explores his classic works including, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. In this well-researched study which offers original findings and insights, Timothy Larsen presents the Mill you never knew. The Mill that even some of his closest disciples never knew. This is John Stuart Mill, the Saint of Rationalism-a secular life and a spiritual life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Stuart Mill observed in his Autobiography that he was a rare case in nineteenth-century Britain because he had not lost his religion but never had any. He was a freethinker from beginning to end. What is not often realized, however, is that Mill's life was nevertheless impinged upon by religion at every turn. This is true both of the close relationships that shaped him and of his own, internal thoughts. Mill was a religious sceptic, but not the kind of person which that term usually conjures up. The unexpected presence and prominence of spirituality is not only there in Mill's late, startling essay, 'Theism', in which he makes the case for hope in God and in Christ. It is everywhere-in his immediate family, his best friends, and his vision for the future. It is even there in such a seemingly unlikely place as his Logic, which repeatedly addresses religious themes. John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life is a biography which follows one of Britain's most well-respected intellectuals through all of the key moments in his life from falling in love to sitting in Parliament and beyond. It also explores his classic works including, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. In this well-researched study which offers original findings and insights, Timothy Larsen presents the Mill you never knew. The Mill that even some of his closest disciples never knew. This is John Stuart Mill, the Saint of Rationalism-a secular life and a spiritual life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• PART I: THE CREATION OF PURITANISM: 1558-1580-- PART II: 'DARK CORNERS OF THE LAND': TOBIE MATTHEW IN DURHAM 1583-1606-- PART III: READING THE REFORMATION-- PART IV: A PURITAN PRELATE? ARCHBISHOP MATTHEW AND STUART CHURCH.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Moderate Radical explores an exciting period of English, and British, history: Elizabethan and Early Stuart religious politics. Tobie Matthew (c. 1544-1628) started Elizabeth's reign as a religious radical, yet ended up running the English Church during the tumultuous years leading up to the British Civil Wars. Moderate Radical provides a new perspective on this period, and an insight into the power of conforming puritanism as a political and cultural force. Matthew's vision of conformity and godly magistracy brought many puritans into the Church, but also furnished them with a justification for rebellion when the puritanism was seriously threatened. Through exciting new sources - Matthew's annotations of his extensive library and newly discovered sermons - Rosamund Oates explores the guiding principles of puritanism in the period and explains why the godly promoted the national church, even when it seemed corrupt. She demonstrates how Matthew protected puritans, but his protection meant that there was a rich seam of dissent at the heart of the Church that emerged when the godly found themselves under attack in the 1620s and 1630s. This is a story about accommodations, conformity and government, as well as a biography of a leading figure in the Church, who struggled to come to terms with his own son's Catholicism and the disappointments of his family. Moderate Radical makes an important contribution to the emerging field of sermon studies, exploring the rich cultures derived from sermons as well as re-creating some of the drama of Matthew's preaching. It offers a new insight into tensions of the pre-Civil War Church.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A Note on Spelling and Abbreviations Introduction
• Chapter 1. Conceptualizing Community in the South English Legendary
• Chapter 2. The Phenomenal Bodies of Anglo-Saxon Virgins
• Chapter 3. Local Community and Secular Poetics in Middle English Lives of St. Wenefred
• Chapter 4. Englishing the Golden Legend and the Geography of Religious Community
• Chapter 5. Secular, Religious, and Literary Jurisdictions
• Chapter 6. The City and the Inner Precincts of the Sacred
• Chapter 7. St. Ursula and the Scale of English Community
• Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms-from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose-the Middle English Lives of England's saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic. Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England's saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Revd Benjamin Armstrong, for many years vicar of the market town of East Dereham, Norfolk, is best-known for what have been described as "one of England's greatest clerical diaries", eleven volumes spanning his whole adult life, between 1850 and 1888. This first full biography puts his story into the context of the period in which he lived: a time of turmoil in the church, with its conflict between high and low forms of service, and theological arguments, stirred up not least by controversies over Darwin's theories of creation. It also vividly portrays rural life at a time of great change, when society became more fluid, railways allowed the economy to grow and develop, and the vote was extended. We see this through the eyes of Armstrong himself, a fine example of the then "new-style" Church of England clergy who lived in their parishes, took more services than their predecessors, supported their schools and showed a genuine concern for the well-being of their parishioners. By the time he retired, church life in Dereham had been transformed, with congregations typically of 1,000 at each of the Sunday services. Armstrong also served on various Local Boards, as well as setting up the Literary Institute, the Rifle Volunteers and supporting musical and cultural events. He also had a full social life; his friends included prominent townspeople and the local clergy, gentry and aristocracy -- and there are incisive pen portraits of many of his associates and their eccentricities. These activities are set against the background of his family life, with its moments of tragedy and worry, including the death of a young child and the elopement of another. Dr Susanna Wade Martins is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. Her previous publications include The East Anglian Countryside: Changing Landscapes 1870-1950 with Tom Williamson (2008), Coke of Norfolk, 1754-1842 (2009) and The Conservation Movement in Norfolk - A History (2015).
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Reckoning
• Before
• During
• Aftermath.

"Rebecca Stott both adored and feared her father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking minister in the Brighton, England, branch of the Exclusive Brethren, a separatist fundamentalist Christian sect. A man of contradictions, he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, which was ruled by Satan, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and read Shakespeare and Yeats. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult's leader, Roger became an actor and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail....In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott's attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father's role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family and the power of self-invention."--Jacket .

• 1. Introduction: the political bible--
• 2. Early modern hermeneutics and the Old Testament--
• 3. The sermon, the listener and enemy theory in the Thirty Years War--
• 4. Hezekiah, the politics of municipal plague and the London poor--
• 5. Constitution and resistance: the language of Civil War political thought--
• 6. Dividing the kingdom: Rehoboam and Jeroboam--
• 7. Hanging up kings: regicide and political memory--
• 8. Preaching on the ramparts: Hezekiah at war--
• 9. How Jezebel became sexy: Ahab, Naboth's land and Jezebelian hermeneutics--
• 10. Conclusion-- Appendix. Chronology of Biblical kings-- Bibliography-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained, across the century, from top to bottom and across all religious positions. It shows how constitutional thought, in this most tumultuous era of civil war, regicide and republic, was forged on the Bible, and how writers ranging from King James, Joseph Hall or John Milton to Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes can be better understood in the context of such vigorous biblical discourse.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Anti-Catholicism and the sanctity of conscience
• In the clink
• A youth from coventry
• Franciscan probabilism and the gift of conscience
• "Problematicall supererogation"
• Deus, natura, gratia
• A detailed look
• A conspiracy (English suite)
• Apologia episcoporum
• Spars of a shipwreck
• Debate over infallibility
• Systema fidei
• Hobbes modestly accosted
• The piety and equity of soul-freedom
• Enchyridion of faith
• Religio philosophi
• Self-censorship without self-suppression.

The historiography of English Catholicism has grown enormously in the last generation, led by scholars such as Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Stefania Tutino, and others. In Suspicious Moderate, Anne Ashley Davenport makes a significant contribution to that literature by presenting a long overdue intellectual biography of the influential English Catholic theologian Francis a Sancta Clara (1598-1680). Born into a Protestant family in Coventry at the end of the sixteenth century, Sancta Clara joined the Franciscan order in 1617. He played key roles in reviving the English Franciscan province and in the efforts that were sponsored by Charles I to reunite the Church of England with Rome. In his voluminous Latin writings, he defended moderate Anglican doctrines, championed the separation of church and state, and called for state protection of freedom of conscience. Suspicious Moderate offers the first detailed analysis of Sancta Clara's works. In addition to his notorious Deus, natura, gratia (1634), Sancta Clara wrote a comprehensive defense of episcopacy (1640), a monumental treatise on ecumenical councils (1649), and a treatise on natural philosophy and miracles (1662). By carefully examining the context of Sancta Clara's ideas, Davenport argues that he aimed at educating English Roman Catholics into a depoliticized and capacious Catholicism suited to personal moral reasoning in a pluralistic world. In the course of her research, Davenport also discovered that "Philip Scot, " the author of the earliest English discussions of Hobbes (a treatise published in 1650), was none other than Sancta Clara. Davenport demonstrates how Sancta Clara joined the effort to fight Hobbes's Erastianism by carefully reflecting on Hobbes's pioneering ideas and by attempting to find common ground with him, no matter how slight.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)