The concept of Fortune (Tychē) had lain at the very center of traditional pagan thought about history. Herodotus thought that the gods intervened in history to control the course of men's fortunes. His successor Thucydides completely rejected any notion of divine intervention in history, but nevertheless used the word tychē twenty-eight times in his speeches, and eleven times in his narrative sections. He did not imply anything which we today would call supernatural by his use of the word, simply unforeseen chance occurrences which disrupted human plans. Polybius' use of the concept of Fortune was particularly notorious, and a vast literature exists on the question of what this historian in fact meant by the term, and whether he thought of Fortune in different ways at different stages in his own intellectual development.

The nature of the relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation has intrigued historians of both the past and the present. Recently a number of noted scholars have attempted to demonstrate the connection between the two movements with varying degrees of success. Historians seem to have marshalled an impressive and growing body of evidence to show the direct relationship between the advent of humanism and the coming of the Lutheran Reformation, even though the exact nature of this relationship has not yet been clarified in a definitive manner. But in the case of humanism and Calvinism no consensus has been reached concerning this problem; consequently, the situation is still in doubt. The purpose of this study is to enhance the historical understanding of the connection between humanism and Calvinism by a fresh analysis of the life and thought of three important first generation leaders of the Reformed church, namely, John Calvin, Theodore Beza and Pierre Viret. Moreover, new evidence on the subject from the career of Viret, the least known but nevertheless a very important member of this Calvinist trinity, will be presented to demonstrate more clearly the positive and direct link between humanism and Calvinism in the formative years of the Reformation.

“Are we to permit none but louts and boors to rule when we can do better than that.” With these words, Martin Luther challenged the politicians of his day to educate the young, for, he wrote, it is pleasing to God that princes, lords and councilmen and others in authority be educated and qualified to perform the functions of their offices. It was necessary for those in authority to educate the young, because many parents would not do it, others were incompetent to do so, others did not have the time, and that was not to mention orphans.One of those politicians who responded to Luther's challenge was Philip the Magnanimous of Hesse. In the years 1526 to 1537, Philip organized a territorial system of public education consisting of state Latin grammar schools and a university.

The thanksgiving sermons offered from Anglican and Puritan pulpits during the seventeenth century, particularly upon such special occasions as proclaimed by Parliament, often led the preacher to consider an important issue for all Reformation Protestants: the response to grace. Whether the specific event were the anniversary of the Spanish Armada, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the defeat of royalist forces at Selby, or the victorious return of the West Indies fleet, the occurrence was interpretable as a special evidence of God's merciful grace. The preacher generally conceived his responsibility to be, first, to remind his congregation of additional mercies, some general in nature (creation, preservation, redemption), and others specific or individual as indicated above. Second, the preacher was to direct his congregation in the manner of its response to these testimonies of grace. Beyond this, the preacher might proceed as he wished. He might fulminate against ingratitude; he might expatiate on the historical or political implications of the event or of past mercies; or he might focus upon the hope for future mercies.

In every diocese in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a clerical elite whose most visible members were the clergy attached to the local cathedral. They included the bishop, the bishop's major judicial and administrative assistants and the cathedral's dean and chapter. What were the general career patterns of these men in the late Stuart and early Georgian periods? From what geographical, social and educational backgrounds were they recruited? What economic rewards did their appointments carry? One might answer these questions by citing contemporary writers and by relating case histories of the clerics involved, but contemporary writers are not always accurate reporters, and individuals are not always representative members of the group as a whole. What is needed is a more systematic investigation of the late Stuart and early Georgian cathedral clergy than has so far been made—one that can establish general patterns for the group as a whole by actually looking at the group as a whole. Collective biography makes it possible to delineate general patterns for an entire group and to relegate the individual example to its proper function—that of illustrating hypotheses that have already been demonstrated by more systematic means. This article attempts such an analysis: it is a prosopographical study of the cathedral clergy of Lincoln Diocese under the late Stuarts and early Hanoverians.

Historians who try to understand encounters between red men and white men in the seventeenth century are immediately confronted with a problem: Indians were not literate, and they left no records of the sort we are accustomed to studying. For centuries the only information about aboriginal populations in the Americas was derived from European narratives, conditioned by viewpoints that harbored an outsider's values. Archaeology added some indigenous references, but the evidence has usually been too meager for adequate generalization. Historians have pursued the goal of avoiding white men's biases and viewing Indian cultures as having an integrity all their own, but that goal has remained an ideal, causing more despair than hope of eventual success. As far as the history of early New Mexico is concerned, the situation is worsened by the fact that most church and government archives were burned during the fighting of 1680–1696.

A period of consensus in American religious historiography has ended, but students of American religion representing a variety of perspectives have recently come to regard Abraham Lincoln, once a subject of great dispute among religionists, as one of the most important and profound of America's theologians and religious leaders, if not the religious center of American history. It is primarily as a spokesman for and symbol of a religious interpretation of American destiny that Lincoln has been placed at this pinnacle, and he has had an especially prominent place in the recent discussion of American civil religion.