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Bettany Hughes's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Bettany Hughes recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Bettany Hughes's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate?

In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry (ordo) in the community. By this definition, women were in fact ordained into several ministries. A radical change in the definition of ordination during the eleventh and twelfth centuries not only removed women from the...
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Recommended by Bettany Hughes, and 1 others.

Bettany HughesWe are talking about very early Christianity here and it is a much neglected field of study to which Gary has contributed a great deal of scholarship. He is very balanced and doesn’t come to any conclusions for which there is no evidence. But he does point out that women had a much stronger role in the early church than the official versions tell us. Women were working as priests and possibly... (Source)

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2

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism--gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium--long history, she identifies the fundamental questions about Byzantium--what it was, and what special significance it holds for us today.

Bringing the latest scholarship to a general audience in accessible prose, Herrin focuses each short chapter around a representative theme, event, monument, or historical figure, and examines it...

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Recommended by Bettany Hughes, and 1 others.

Bettany HughesByzantium is one of the first ever monotheistic empires. It is incredibly influential. It always appears as a footnote in Western history but at the time it was in control of vast parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and at times North Africa. So this was a Greek Orthodox Christian Empire. It is interesting to see what you do in a monotheistic civilisation. It is the first time it has... (Source)

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3
In this sumptuously illustrated book, Joan Breton Connelly gives us the first comprehensive cultural history of priestesses in the ancient Greek world. Connelly presents the fullest and most vivid picture yet of how priestesses lived and worked, from the most famous and sacred of them--the Delphic Oracle and the priestess of Athena Polias--to basket bearers and handmaidens. Along the way, she challenges long-held beliefs to show that priestesses played far more significant public roles in ancient Greece than previously acknowledged.

Connelly builds this history through a pioneering...
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Recommended by Bettany Hughes, and 1 others.

Bettany HughesThis is a lovely book which is beautifully produced and very detailed. It puts the priestesses in the classical world in their prehistoric context and then it looks ahead to Christianity. One of the sections which really appeals to me is the discussion about the priestesses who were the keepers of keys of the temples in ancient Athens. These keys were huge great things. You see them carved on the... (Source)

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4

Ancient Goddesses

The nurturing Earth Goddess, the Great Mother worshipped at the dawn of civilization—historical fact or consoling fiction?
While Goddess mythologies proliferate and the public devours books by artists, psychotherapists, and enthusiastic amateurs, it is remarkable that those in the field of prehistory have remained largely silent. Did Goddess worship really exist? What actually remains from the earliest cultures, and what can it tell us? What can we learn about the early stages of human religion from the study of prehistoric carvings, pictures, pottery, figurines, and temples?
In...

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Recommended by Bettany Hughes, and 1 others.

Bettany HughesThis is a collection of chapters published by the British Museum Press. It was published in 1998, which was just at the time when I was starting to really consolidate all my research in this field. It was one of those moments when I was walking through the British Museum and I saw this book and thought, how fantastic, someone is thinking along the same lines as me. (Source)

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5
From poet and classicist Anne Carson comes this translation of the work of Sappho, together with the original Greek. Carson presents all the extant fragments of Sappho's verse, employing brackets and white space to denote missing text - allowing the reader to imagine the poems as they were written. less
Recommended by Lydia Ruffles, Bettany Hughes, and 2 others.

Bettany HughesThis is a collection of fragments of Sappho’s poems. They are so beautiful, I would recommend them to anyone. (Source)

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