Customer Reviews

The Runes on the Cross: The Story of Our Anglo-Saxon Heritage

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Runes on the Cross is an introduction to church history in Great Britain. It does an excellent job of showing the competing images - the Anglo-Saxon view of "warrior-king", the Celtic "hermit-ascete" and the Roman "wealthy bishop" - and how these images interplayed within the church and in secular government.

The book is structured as a series of short entries on individuals, events or places rather than into a sustained narrative. This works well given the changing geographic boundaries and the vagarities of the political times. However, it left me wanting a genealogy for references as brothers, sisters, cousins, and entourages reappear in unexpected places.

This book contains only a few of the hagiographic miracle stories, but enough are provided to give a sense of the common beliefs of the time.

This book provides sufficient historical background to understand the development of the Catholic Church in England; enough for a non-historian, only a brief overview for the true historian.