Religion

Richard Wilkinson argues against the prevailing orthodoxy.

A sea voyage in the 12th century was a perilous undertaking, as a Spanish Muslim courtier’s account of his crossing of the Mediterranean demonstrates. Yet, explains David Abulafia, it was also a test of one’s religious devotion, whether Muslim or Christian.

Though their appeal seems bizarre to the modern mind, relics and reliquaries reflected an entirely logical system of belief bound up in the medieval worldview, explains James Robinson, curator of a new exhibition at the British Museum.

The Victorian era was an age of faith – which is why it was also a golden period of progress, argues Tim Stanley.

One of the last popes to play a major role in international affairs, Innocent XI defied Louis XIV, the Sun King, and played a decisive part in the defence of Christianity against the spread of Islam under the auspices of the Ottoman empire, as Graham Darby explains.

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of St Catherine of Siena's canonisation by Pope Pius II on 29 April 1461.

Since its discovery in Yemen in 1972 a collection of brittle documents, believed to be among the earliest Koranic texts, has been the subject of fierce and divisive debate among scholars of Islamic history, as Scott MacMillan reports.

Though it is immersed in the theological ideas of the Middle Ages, the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy is sophisticated, sceptical and tolerant, argues James Burge.

Richard Sugg explains the origins of the term ‘Blood Libel’, an antisemitic ritual murder myth with a long and ugly history.

A monarch’s divine ability to cure scrofula was an established ritual when James I came to the English throne in 1603. Initially sceptical of the Catholic characteristics of the ceremony, the king found ways to ‘Protestantise’ it and to reflect his own hands-on approach to kingship, writes Stephen Brogan.