Martin D. Stringer is lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology of Religion and Head of the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

'This is a well and lucidly written book. A great deal of material have been included and crafted into a convincingly written narrative. The scholarship is profound and the wealth of material here is always germane to his argument. I found it required considerable concentration at times, but this is right and only to be expected in a work of this depth. Dr Stringer has written a book of seminal importance which deserves to guide and inform the study of Christian worship for many years to come. Buy. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.' Dr Richard Buxton, Society for Liturgical Study

• Introduction: discourse, devotion and embodiment; 1. Early Christian worship, texts and contexts to AD 300; 2. Worship and the Christianisation of public spaces 300–600; 3. Hegemonic discourses in the worship of Empires 600–900; 4. The dominant discourse of cosmological Christianity 900–1200; 5. Accessing the demotic discourses of devotion 1200–1500; 6. Worship and the rise of humanistic discourses 1500–1800; 7. The globalisation of Christian worship 1800–2000.

Martin D. Stringer is lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology of Religion and Head of the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

'This is a well and lucidly written book. A great deal of material have been included and crafted into a convincingly written narrative. The scholarship is profound and the wealth of material here is always germane to his argument. I found it required considerable concentration at times, but this is right and only to be expected in a work of this depth. Dr Stringer has written a book of seminal importance which deserves to guide and inform the study of Christian worship for many years to come. Buy. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.' Dr Richard Buxton, Society for Liturgical Study

• Introduction: discourse, devotion and embodiment; 1. Early Christian worship, texts and contexts to AD 300; 2. Worship and the Christianisation of public spaces 300–600; 3. Hegemonic discourses in the worship of Empires 600–900; 4. The dominant discourse of cosmological Christianity 900–1200; 5. Accessing the demotic discourses of devotion 1200–1500; 6. Worship and the rise of humanistic discourses 1500–1800; 7. The globalisation of Christian worship 1800–2000.