Crafting an effective series in church history is no easy challenge: we are talking about two thousand years of something like global history. In recent decades the Penguin History of the Church series has set the standard. Even now one marvels at the concise erudition of Henry Chadwick's Early Church; or the rich feel for the period in R. W. Southern's Western society and the Church in the Middle Ages; or the crisp precision of Owen Chadwick's The Reformation. But that series was first published (by Pelican) in the 1960s; it is showing its age. Students find it increasingly distant and inaccessible. We need a replacement.

The task has become only harder in recent decades. We are now even less satisfied with a story of the Church that concerns itself only with men and primarily with institutions, yet it is impossibly difficult to draw the narrative away from these aspects. The magnificently produced People's History of the Church series (published recently by Fortress Press and edited by Denis R. Janz) focuses on ‘the laity, the ordinary faithful, the people’, but in doing so it can serve only as an adjunct to what we still need, a full and contemporary account of the history of Christianity. In that light, the Baker History of the Church was shaping up nicely. It reached four volumes before, regrettably, coming to a premature end under the force of recent economic recession. The need for a credible, contemporary church history remains.

The I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church series may well be the replacement that we need. At the time of writing volumes iv and v in the series are still to be published. The series aims ‘to be both new and traditional’ and it has so far been successful. It mixes a familiar narrative with perspectives that recognise updated scholarship and current concerns, most notably the engagement with Islam, which the series handles well in several places. It seems unfair to criticise any work in church history for what is left out, since there is always too much to put in, and I think each of the writers under review has done a good job of establishing their narrative priorities. If there is one exception to this, it is the relative inattention to forms of Christianity beyond the borders of the Roman Empire in the first millennium of the faith. This omission now seems even more acute in light of very recent publications such as Philip Jenkins's The lost history of Christianity or Diarmaid MacCulloch's wonderfully profligate A history of Christianity: the first three thousand years, where this wider concern is very much in evidence.

This omission is most noticeable in the first volume in the series, The early Church by Morwenna Ludlow, which takes the story up until 600 ce. She says little about the varieties of Christianity in Africa and Asia. Yet it is an excellent introduction to Christianity in the Mediterranean world. It opens with a chapter on the canon and the central elements of early Christian belief, worship, liturgy and leadership before examining the practice and piety of Christians in a context of persecution. From there Ludlow ably navigates internal boundaries by discussing Gnosticism and its variants with a particular focus on Rome; and the development of Christian thought in Alexandria and Carthage. Chapter v discusses Diocletian, Constantine and Arius. Here Ludlow plays down almost completely the privileging of Christianity by Constantine: the Church was wealthy and worldly before the fourth century; and earlier emperors were not without sympathy toward Christians. There is a great deal of truth in this, but we have come a long way from the ‘Constantinian Revolution’; perhaps too far. The remainder of the book is dominated by debates over Christology. Ludlow demonstrates an enviable mastery of this complex material and offers just what students require to find their way in those intricate conversations. The discussion is longer than it needs to be within the balance of the book, but it remains an expert handling of difficult material. And the work as a whole provides a superb introduction to both diversity and continuity within early Christianity.

The best test for the effectiveness of the vision for the series is the book written by the series editor, G. R. Evans, on the Church in the early Middle Ages. This is the volume with the closest eye for a contemporary edge, with allusions to interfaith dialogue, the internet, regime change, terrorism, terrorists and the war on terror. These are potentially anachronistic, and I wonder how they will read in ten years' time, but they generally work well. The book spans the period from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages, with no very specific boundary markers. Chapters focus on the order of the Church and the place of the laity, the division between east and west, the crusades, the religious orders and intellectual life. Since these are thematic, the central narrative of the history in this period is only implied. A lot of space is given to outsiders, in chapters iii and vii, revealing a determination to make this story of contemporary relevance. I found the material increasingly convincing as it developed. The opening chapter, ‘The medieval history of the Church in time and space’, is elusive; the final chapter, ‘The Church and the intellectuals’, is impressively rich and informative. Evans assembles a truly astonishing breadth of anecdote, with references to dozens and dozens of obscure figures whose experience helps to illustrate the story. Sometimes these are difficult to place in context and they fragment the narrative, particularly as Evans draws almost at random from any of the seven centuries under discussion. For all that, though, the lavish illustration results in a book that comes closest to Southern in evoking the life of the Church in a distant age. There is a continuing focus on the west, Latin phrases go untranslated, and women are strangely absent. Even so, the book is superb.

The whole series has been ‘organised so that the boundary-dates between volumes come in some unexpected places’. This has placed the greatest burden on Ludlow and Evans who (taken together) admirably cover the first thirteen centuries of the story. So far, this structure is not so different from the Penguin series. The innovation is in the next volume, The Church in the later Middle Ages, written by Norman Tanner. The timeframe – 1300 to 1500 – is an inspired choice. It has previously been seen as a relative wasteland of catastrophic turns while the western Church waited around for the Reformation. Tanner is careful to outline the disasters and crises of the times, but the luxury of focusing on only two centuries allows him also to present life and vitality, particularly among the grassroots of the laity where the Church remained a popular and meaningful part of the fabric of their communal life. Tanner has written this book with impressive simplicity and clarity. His explanation of the structure of the Church is the best that I have ever read, perfectly suited to students new to church history, and helpful for understanding the Church across a far greater span than just the two centuries under discussion. The story opens with a survey of the popes who led the western Church through the season at Avignon (which, as Tanner nicely points out, was not unprecedented), the papal schism, the emergence of Conciliarism and the Renaissance. It then draws on the experience of the clergy and religious orders and the laity, illustrated with a particular focus on the city of Norwich. Chapter iv, which surveys the development of knowledge and culture in the universities and beyond, is perhaps the weakest, reading at times rather like a list of thinkers and personalities. This is true also of the next chapter, on heresy and dissent, but the perspective of a fundamentally healthy climate within the Church is a welcome one. The eastern Churches supply the focus of chapter vi, while the final chapter considers the connections between Christendom and the broader world of Judaism, Islam and paganism. The book is a close, refreshing examination of a neglected period; it works well.

Volumes iv and v in the series are still to be published. They will focus on early modern Christianity and the long eighteenth century. Frances Knight picks up the narrative in The Church in the nineteenth century. She is an excellent storyteller with a dry humour and a good eye for an apt detail (this is the only book in which I am likely to come across the Dutch Association of Catholic Goat Breeders). She writes smoothly and with economy, and proves herself to be an assured and capable guide through the territory, not least in supplying the necessary historical background to understanding developments in the Church. The book has two parts. The first makes a geographical survey of the Church in England and Wales, in Europe (both Protestant and Catholic), in the United States and Canada, and in places of mission around the world. The second part is thematic, formed around two broad modes of interpretation. The first is one of renewal and revival in which Evangelicalism was a dominant force, expressed through revivalist techniques; personified in a range of key figures; sustained through ebbs and flows; and experienced by significant numbers of varied populations. The second mode is one of dislocation and decline in which the Enlightenment advanced the process of secularisation, opened up space for leisure, and corroded previous certainties of the faith. Knight concludes by exploring the interwoven themes of piety, femininity and sobriety in order to convey some of the distinctive tones of nineteenth-century Christianity. In her hands the series becomes genuinely global in its attentions, showing how the nineteenth century provided so many of the antecedents to the story of the faith across the twentieth century.

Jeremy Morris tells that story in The Church in the modern age. This is another well-written and well-structured volume. It divides the century into three periods, from 1914 to 1945; 1945 to 1973; and 1973 to 2000. Each section has a chapter on Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy, and each concludes with a chapter whose focus spans the century: mission and ecumenism; independent Churches and new religious movements; and Pentecostalism. In sum, it delivers the ‘comprehensive overview’ promised in the preface with its impressive global reach and its balanced judgements. Overall, the Christian faith neither advanced nor declined during the century, in terms of the proportion of adherents among the global population. But Morris does a good job of sketching the decline in some places (especially in certain quarters of the Church in the west) and the evident growth in others places (most notably the global south). He marks the high points in the story as well as the less impressive dimensions. He shows how welcome advances such as the end of western colonisation and the fall of Communism brought about their own complications. He is warm, generous and sympathetic in some places, critical and measured in others; I found all these judgements compelling and interesting. The book supplies a very effective conclusion to the series.

Indeed, if the remaining two volumes maintain the same high standard as the books under review, the whole series will be a great success. For all the reservations that I have expressed about individual titles, I am impressed with each one. I like the way in which each reflects the particular interests and style of its author, with no imposed uniformity; they mesh together very well. And the books are well produced, though unfortunately only in hardback. This presents an obstacle that needs to be overcome: the price. At £24.50 the books are a steep investment for the average student, especially when converted into foreign currency. One hopes that I. B. Tauris has in mind to offer them in paperback, soon, and at a comparable price to the Penguin History of the Church. If it does, this is, I think, a worthy replacement.