"A book of the best possible originality. It presents a theme that has been hotly debated in modern scholarly circles with a novel freshness, while drawing the attention of the reader to the urgent relevance of such debates to the history of modern Europe. This is a book of quite exemplary clarity. It deserves to be widely read and will doubtless spark off lively discussion among scholars."--Peter Brown, Princeton University

Patrick J. Geary is Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the first Millennium (Princeton), Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, and Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton).