The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

In the seventeenth century, the largely Protestant nation of England was preoccupied with its Catholic subjects. They inspired more prolific and harsher criticism and more elaborate attempts at legal regulation than did any other minority group. To understand this phenomenon, Frances E. Dolan probes the verbal and visual representations of Catholics and Catholicism and the uses to which these were put during three crises in Protestant'Catholic relations: the gunpowder plot (1605), Queen Henrietta Maria's open advocacy of Catholicism in the 1630s and 1640s, and the popish and meal tub plots (1678—1680). She uses each crisis as a jumping-off point, an opportunity for speculation, as did contemporary writers. Drawing on political, religious, and legal writings and offering fresh readings of literary texts such as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Dolan shows how often Catholics and Catholicism were linked to disorderly women. Dolan maintains that since Catholics were members of many English families and communities and prominent at court, the threat they offered was precisely that they could not be readily isolated and assigned to a category—both laws and polemic struggled to identify Catholics, but never succeeded in establishing a clear line between Catholics and everyone else. In seventeenth-century England, Dolan says, the threat of Catholicism lay in the tension between the foreign and the familiar, the different and the same.

Are you missing half the story about the last days? Virtually all attention these days is focused on the coming Antichrist—but he is only half the story. Many people are amazed to discover in Revelation 17 that there is also another mysterious character at the heart of prophecy—a woman who rides the beast. Who is this woman? Tradition says she is connected with the church of Rome. But isn’t such a view outdated? After all, today’s Vatican is eager to join hands with Protestants worldwide. “The Catholic church has changed” is what we hear. Or has it? In A Woman Rides the Beast, prophecy expert Dave Hunt sifts through biblical truth and global events to present a well-defined portrait of the woman and her powerful place in the Antichrist’s future empire. Eight remarkable clues in Revelation 17 and 18 prove the woman’s identity beyond any reasonable doubt. A provocative account of what the Bible tells us is to come.

The Bible contains many stories of prostitution. Feminist and liberation readings of these biblical narratives have often made sex workers invisible. 'Sex Working and the Bible' examines stories of biblical prostitution through the experiences and understanding of sex workers today. The Bible narratives - ranging across Rahab in the Book of Joshua, the story of Solomon and the two prostitutes, the anointing women traditions, and the apocalyptic vision of the whore of Babylon in Revelation - are set within both a practical and theoretical framework. This radical book offers a new, more inclusive way of approaching issues of gender, sexuality and prostitution in the Bible.

In Theologising with the Sacred ‘Prostitutes’ of South India, Eve Rebecca Parker theologises with the Dalit women who from childhood have been dedicated to village goddesses and used as ‘sacred’ sex workers.

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

An account of the intellectual and cultural history of church architecture in Stuart England based upon the discourse analysis of forty consecration sermons.