Christianity

Geoffrey Grigson examines the treatment, by artists and poets, of the "three wise men" of Christian scripture.

In 1453 the Duke of Burgundy and his knights dramatically pledged themselves to crusade against the Turkhut with many face-saving qualifications. By Dorothy Margaret Stuart.

F.M.H. Markham profiles Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, the French political theorist and early advocate for a centralised, technocratic society.

Christian Byzantium and the Muslim Abbasid caliphate were bitter rivals. Yet the necessities of trade and a mutual admiration of ancient Greece meant that there was far more to their relationship than war, as Jonathan Harris explains.

No monument of Christian architecture is more celebrated than the Cathedral of Chartres. Peter Quennell here traces both the origins of the great church and the effect it has exercised on succeeding generations.

Seton Lloyd describes how modern research into the early Christian history of what is now Turkey has promoted an Apocryphal story from myth to reality.

J.W.N. Watkins illustrates how the great individualist thinkers of the 17th century had a profound effect upon the development of modern Europe.

The site of her oldest university and the home of one of her earliest missionary Saints, St. Andrews holds a special position in the history of Scotland, as Russell Kirk here explains.

Today, choosing a new Archbishop of Canterbury is a relatively straightforward process. It was not always so, as Katherine Harvey explains.

Often portrayed as a paragon of Christian virtue, the real King Arthur was an embarrassment to the Church, writes Simon Andrew Stirling.

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of St Catherine of Siena's canonisation by Pope Pius II.

The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Though Protestants sought to distance themselves from Roman Catholics on the subject, angels  played a key role in Protestant culture as a means by which to understand humans and their place in the universe, explains Joad Raymond.