The Untold Story of the Season That Shaped the World

Every year, millions of people bow their heads to receive a cross of ash and hear words that never lose their weight: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

But how many know the full story of what follows?

Lent Through the Ages is the most compelling history of Lent ever written for the general reader. Spanning seventeen centuries of faith, controversy, and civilization, this book reveals how a forty-day season of fasting and repentance shaped Western history in ways most people have never noticed.

Lent built fish industries that helped pull European civilization toward the Americas. It inspired Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Michelangelo's Piet