Bibliography, November 2024

BOTM: P. Heather, Christendom (2023)

A. Berkeley, Trial and Error (1937)
B.J. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (2021)

M. Chabon, Gentlemen of the road (2007)
A. Christie, The Sittaford mystery (1924)
A. Christie, A murder is announced (1953)
H. Eyres, Wine Dynasties of Europe (1990)

J. Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies (2024)

I. Pezeshkzad, My uncle Napoleon (1973)
E. Rasmussen, The Shakespeare thefts (2010)

I went to an Agatha Christie evening mid-month, hence the golden age crime kick here. They were good. She remains the best of them all. Elsewhere, very pleasing blocks of historical reading, on the Capetians and Islamic Spain, both of which I liked, though both had a few issues of style and content. Catlos was better. I also hugely enjoyed My Uncle Napoleon. It was sold to me as reminiscent of Wodehouse in pre-revolutionary Iran. That is an accurate description and it is therefore huge fun. It's too long though. Wodehouse keeps it tighter.

Preamble over, I now want to talk about Peter Heather's book, which I loved. It's straddles both my Masters and especially my Doctoral research so I was disposed to care lots about it. I'm no expert on the later western church, so I've no skin in that game, but he does also confirm what I argued in my doctorate about Theodosius I so I'm pleased with that. I am also delighted to see the rare sight of someone doing the maths properly and using that to point to the centrality of royal and imperial power to Christianization. There's lots of like about that, for example, very good on the numbers of churches which were quite low till well into the middle ages. It’s also, if we were looking for relevance, an exemplary political economy analysis in relation to the papacy, and showing how little actual power popes had till the failure of both the Empires that followed the End of Rome in the West. Bizarrely, it came to my attention through work, but I'm very very glad it did.