Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

the understanding of a culture very hard for Westerners properly to understand is a wise study by a great Orthodox exile, of much more general interest than its title implies, J. Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian relations in the 14th Century (Cambridge, 1981). Extremely lively is T. Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (London, 1974). W. van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe: East and West in the Religious Ideology of Russia (London, 1999), a translation of De mythe van het Oosten. Oost en West in de religieuze ideeengeschiedenis van Rusland (Zoetermeer, 1998), provides further general insight. G. Hosking, Russia: People and Empire 1551-1917 (1997), is an excellent complement to the early focus of these works, and a highly engaging journey beyond high politics and elites is made in A. Sinyavsky, Ivan the Fool. Russian Folk Belief: A Cultural History (Moscow, 2007), a translation of this noted dissident novelist's original text. S. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2002), helps to explain the tangled relationship of Russia and Ukraine, while a superb biography of a key figure is I. de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible (New Haven and London, 2005).

PART VI: WESTERN CHRISTIANITY DISMEMBERED (1300-1800)

General Reading
    A firework display of insights into the period is provided by J. Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985). D. MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (London, 2003), provides an overview; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), evokes with elegiac elegance the world which the Reformation destroyed and the way in which one kingdom destroyed it.

16: Perspectives on the True Church (1300- 1517)
    The period is well introduced by N. P. Tanner, The Church in the Later Middle Ages (London, 2008). A passionate survey of one of its most important products, whose consequences remain still fully to be worked out, is F. Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300-1870 (Oxford, 2003). That giant among Dutch historians J. Huizinga produced a classic introduction to Erasmus of Rotterdam (London, 1952), a translation of the Dutch original of 1924; it can be triangulated with L.-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1993), and a delightful and profound meditation by M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London, 1997).

17: A House Divided (1517- 1660)
    Varied voices of a galaxy of experts on the European Reformation are heard in A. Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation World (London, 2000), and R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity 6: Reform and Expansion 1500-1660 (Cambridge, 2007). Textbook-style is B. Kumin (ed.), The European World 1500-1800 (London, 2009), Part 3. A series of sure guides to the complex theological disputes of the period are furnished by D. Bagchi and D. Steinmetz (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge, 2004). Of the countless biographies of the Reformation's first great personality, a variety of introductory spotlights appear in D. K. McKim (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge, 2003). M. Marty, Martin Luther (New York, 2004) is concise, and would be provocatively complemented by progressing to R. Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999). All these would be a painless prelude to M. Brecht, Martin Luther (3 vols., London, 1985-93), translated from Martin Luther (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1981-7), a work conceived on a grand scale from within the Lutheran tradition, and therefore inclined to give Luther multiple benefits of the doubt. The resulting Lutheranism in Germany should be sampled in the essays of the tragically short-lived R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987).
    G. R. Potter (ed.),