Chapter 3 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly prosperous (and sometimes increasingly populous) parish churches of larger communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the city of Norwich as well as clusters of related buildings in York and London.

Chapter 2 investigates how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the emergence of the open-plan parish church afforded residents of rapidly expanding municipalities the means to build ostentatious places of worship that maximized space, minimized cost, and expressed their ambitions as emerging social agents. Case-study locales include Gorleston-on-Sea (Norfolk), North Walsham (Norfolk), Beccles (Suffolk), King’s Lynn (Norfolk), Dartmouth (Devon), St Ives (Cornwall), and Oldham (Lancashire).

Chapter 6 investigates the ways in which new approaches to parish church design augmented the spatial, visual, and aural experience of their resident communities—with special attention to the roles of boundary-marking installations such as screens, seats, and stained-glass windows. Items of special interest include screens at Woodbridge (Suffolk) and Totnes (Devon); seats at King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and Altarnun (Cornwall); stained glass in various locations across Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cornwall; and the spectacular suite of timber furnishings preserved at Southwold (Suffolk).

Chapter 1 surveys scholarly approaches to the development of the parish church as a spatial/social phenomenon in medieval England. It introduces the example of the “open-plan parish church,” a distinctive architectural type defined by the absence of any structural division between nave and chancel, as a powerful mechanism for analyzing the dynamics of architectural form, architectural function, and architectural facture in late medieval society.

Chapter 5 moves from the municipality to the manor to explore how the open-plan parish church format expedited the exercise of lordly provision, piety, and power in an era of political tumult. Case-study locales include Scottow (Norfolk), Nayland (Suffolk), Long Melford (Suffolk), Denston (Suffolk), Loddon (Norfolk), Shelton (Norfolk), Salthouse (Norfolk), Middleton (Lancashire), Sefton (Lancashire), and a collection of manors associated with the Stanley family in northeastern Wales.

Chapter 4 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly populous (and sometimes increasingly prosperous) parish churches of smaller communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the county of Suffolk as well as clusters of related buildings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall.

The conclusion argues, on the basis of the evidence presented throughout the book, that the open-plan parish church represents a special achievement in several respects: spatially (qua the English parish church), socially (qua the English parish church), and architecturally (as a manifestation of collaborative Gothic). It closes with a survey of the legacy of the type in the anglophone world.

This chapter describes two theological utopian alternatives to capitalism: the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and the political theology of Jürgen Moltmann, giving special attention to how each highlights a specific instance of capitalism’s double movement of social cohesion and liberation to propose an alternative. The chapter shows that while both are insightful for clarifying the theological elements at stake, they fail to provide a real alternative even as they point together to an apocalyptic theopolitics.

The introduction begins by connecting the prevalence of apocalyptic expectations and end-of-the-world scenarios in our culture to the dystopic dominion of capitalism, offering some basic definitions to clarify the key concepts. While there seems to be no alternative to this dominion, I pose the central question of whether the church can be a site for contestation and transformation.

Turning to a renewed understanding of apocalyptic shaped by a biblical perspective, this chapter reads history confessionally to see in Jesus Christ a radical opening of history by God’s faithful action, the power of which is gathering a new people under Christ’s lordship freed from the dominion of the Powers and Principalities. From his particular life, message, and ministry, a new humanity of interdependence, solidarity, nonviolence, and mutual provision offers the prospect of an alternative path for history out of capitalism and into social renewal.

Following the trajectory of the church’s call to peacemaking amid the dystopia of capitalism, the Conclusion traces three vectors for the near future of such work: economic solidarity, restorative justice and abolition, and building radical democracy. In each, the church enacts a politics for renewal.

The main topic of this chapter is the series of ecumenical councils extending from Constantine the Great until the age of Photius. These councils were imperial councils, convened by the emperor, their decrees issued as imperial laws. From the Council of Chalcedon onwards, both the agenda and the decisions taken by each council were dictated by the emperor of the time, who was particularly concerned to secure decrees that would reunite the church after a period of division. Conciliar definitions of doctrine may have served the development of doctrine, but this was not their aim, which was to reaffirm and protect the doctrines of the church fathers from contamination by novel heresy. Also to be examined is the category of council called σύνοδος ἐνδημοῦσα/synodos endemousa, usually translated as ‘home synod’, which were councils whose distinctive feature was their summoning when needed by the patriarch of Constantinople on his own authority; these councils came to replace ecumenical ones. Finally, to illustrate the contrasting situation in Late Byzantium, the pro-Palamite synods of 1341, 1347, 1351 and 1357 will be discussed; these were primarily patriarchal synods, though with imperial involvement.

Chapter 7 closes the study by focusing on a single source: Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies On the Song of Songs. Through them, he weaves his most comprehensive and sustained account of the history, ontology, and activity of the devil and his army of demons. Only Christ is victorious over this army of hostile powers in the proper sense. Christians participate in Christ’s victory by journeying with Gregory through On the Song of Songs. The way of victory begins with baptism and continues with prayer, pure thoughts, and self-knowing. Like those sources examined in the previous chapters, the homilies undertake a journey toward victory, bringing to the fore the eschatological nature of spiritual warfare. This chapter, along with the previous ones, demonstrates that in addition to his other accolades, Gregory of Nyssa was an erudite homilist and skilled teacher on spiritual warfare.

The book ends with a review of the long and complex history of feminine imagery for the Church and presents major conclusions from the book’s case studies, such as the remarkable and previously unrecognized continuities and changes across the periodization divide established by the English Reformation. The Conclusion also reviews the analytical method used in the book’s case studies – which is adaptable to feminine imagery for the Church in sources outside the book’s scope – and evaluates the aptitude of the term “goddess” for Lady Church in the context of comparative religious studies.

Chapter 7 argues that feminine imagery is the most pervasive strategy in the fifteenth-century Lollard vernacular treatise The Lanterne of Liȝt for encouraging readers to identify affectively with Christ’s true Church while participating in the liturgical, sacramental, and charitable practices of mainstream ecclesiastical life. The chapter identifies a distinctive “ecclesial spirituality” of relating directly to Lady Church in historical circumstances that were hostile and deadly toward religious dissent.