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The calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII is now the most widely used civil calendar in the world. The older calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. underestimated the length of the year by about 11 minutes. As centuries passed, the accumulated error grew. By the late 1500s the Julian calendar was behind by twelve days. Set amid the backdrop of the Reformation and the Renaissance, a time of great schism in the Christian world, the story of the calendar reform is an intriguing one. A central part concerns the antagonistic relationship between two of the great intellectual figures of the 16th century: the pro-reform mathematician Christopher Clavius and the anti-reform literary scholar Joseph Scaliger. In this book, the author provides an accessible mathematical description of the old and new calendars as well as a detailed discussion of the historical context for, and the main players involved in the calendar reform.

For more than two centuries, Butler's Lives of the Saints has been hailed as the authority on the Christian patron saints. Now, in this new edition of the original classic, Michael Walsh has culled the ruch resources of earlier editions to accentuate the more modern and best-documented saints. Echoing the charm and style of the eighteenth-century edition, Walsh's volume has been edited to make the fascinating and inspiring lives of the saints easily accessible to readers today. This edition features saints from many nations and backgrounds and includes new articles on recently canonized saints. The index offers the list of saints from the complete edition, and includes all new canonizations and new dates, making it eh most up-to-date listing of saints available. Butlter's Lives of the Saints remains a remarkable reference source and, through its comprehensive biographies, a valuable aid to devotion and a rich source of historical information.

Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation.

Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity.

Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.