Books like The rise of Western Christendom by Peter Robert Lamont Brown

A sweeping, narrative history of the Middle Ages that blends cultural, religious, and social insight with updated scholarship and new biographical sketches, offering a fresh, engaging view of medieval life.

Explores how the early Christian Church reshaped Western intellectual life, turning a culture of inquiry into one that subordinates the mind to authority and accepts divine incomprehensibility as inevitable.

Boy bishops, Holy Innocents, child saints, martyrs and prophets, choirboys and choirgirls, orphans, charity-school children, Sunday-school children, privileged children, deprived, exploited and suffering children - all these feature in this exciting collection of over thirty original essays by a team of international scholars. The overall themes are the development of the idea of childhood and the experience of children within Christian society - the often ambiguous role of the child both as passive object of ecclesiastical concern and as active religious subject. The authors consider theological and liturgical issues and the social history of the family, as well as art history, literature and music. In its interdisciplinary scope the work reflects the manifold ways in which children have participated in the life of the Church over the centuries. The subjects under discussion range from the girls of fourth-century Rome to missionary activity in nineteenth-century India; from the unbaptized babies of Byzantium to the Salisbury choirgirls of the 1990s. Adopting a broad, ecumenical approach, the collection includes perspectives on Greeks, Latins, Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans and Dissenters.

"In the early Roman empire, Christians were seen by pagans as overthrowers of ancient gods and destroyers of the prevailing social order. Allegations that Christians recognized each other by secret marks, met at night and made love to one another indiscriminately, worshipped the head of an ass and the genitals of their high priests, and ate children were widely believed. In examining these charges and the Christian response to them, Benko has provided a persuasively argued and refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the confrontation of the pagan and early Christian worlds."[book cover].