The intellectual dominance of the clergy is an important feature of Catholic Christianity in the second and third centuries. If one goes through the roll of Christian writers from the period, one finds very few laymen: Hermas, Justin, Tertullian, Minucius Felix. The great majority were ordained men, including a disproportionate number of bishops: Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, Melito, Theophilus, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexandria, Cyprian, to give but a partial list.

During the sixth session of the Council of Trent, Girolamo Seripando and others proposed a theory of justification which the council fathers felt leaned toward the Lutheran view of justification. The theory, known as duplex justitia or double justice, was reviewed by the various theologians, reflected upon, and finally rejected.

Though one of the most Protestant nations (approximately 96 percent belong to the state Lutheran church), Norway seemingly had neither cause nor opportunity to write the history of her Reformation. For her the modern writing of history began only in the early nineteenth century, triggered by the nationalism of the Napoleonic era and the July Revolution of 1830. Lacking the Reformation era's religious polemicism, Norway produced no church historians, such as those in other countries who helped found modern historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was not even a printing press in Norway until 1643. But in 1811 Norway's first university, the present University of Oslo, was founded and soon became a center for historical research and writing. Far more important, on May 17, 1814, Norwegian representatives signed their constitution, making their land a constitutional monarchy. Precipitated by the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, which tore Norway from over four centuries of royal union with Denmark, a Napoleonic “loser,” and forced her into another ninety–year royal union with victorious Sweden, this constitution, as the only one from the revolutionary era to survive the Metternichian system, became the symbol of one of the most fervent and long-lasting displays of nationalism in modern times. This nationalism is the most important key toward understanding the writing Norwegian historians have done, or not done, about their Reformation.

There can be little doubt that for centuries the most important single unit of the Christian church has been the parish. It is surely the most fundamental of the structures upon which the institutional church has been built. Only by studying closely the parish and what goes on within it can we gain a real appreciation of what religion has meant and continues to mean to the average Christian at the grass roots level. It is somewhat surprising, given the general spread of interest in social history among contemporary historians, that there has not been more study of the parish. One can understand the superior appeal of historical theology to the historian who concentrates on ideas, given the range and sophistication of the systems of thought created over the centuries by theologians, but we should not forget that these systems could not even be comprehended by the great majority of Christians. One can similarly understand the superior appeal of ecclesiastical politics to the historian who concentrates on events, given the high drama in which ecclesiastical leaders have often been engaged, but we should not assume that these events necessarily even came to the attention of average Christians. But for the historian of society who is interested in the religious experience of the average man, the parish must be a starting point.

The Society of Jesus was a consistently controversial institution in France after papal confirmation of the order in 1540 and its installation in Paris shortly afterward. As early as 1562 a jealous University of Paris challenged, unsuccessfully, the right of its members to teach. They became embroiled in political matters from the first. King Henry IV and the Parlement of Paris, the most important law court of the realm, cooperated in exiling them from France between 1594 and 1603 because of their political intrigues.

During the early nineteenth century Americans developed a new consciousness of children and of childhood as a stage of life. While it may be hyperbolic to term this event the “discovery of the child,” it seems clear that nineteenth-century Americans saw children and adolescents in very different ways than did their ancestors. Adults began to recognize the characteristics of childhood which separated children from themselves and to perceive that psychological and emotional changes accompanied the physical experience of puberty. Thus the nineteenth century saw the beginning of attempts to understand children on their own terms and to elaborate a theory of that stage later termed “adolescence.”