This article examines three works by the ninth-century theologian, Paschasius Radbertus, all addressed to the Carolingian community of religious women at Notre Dame de Soissons. In addition to being valuable sources for the Mariologist, these sources provide insights into the complex social world of Carolingian religious women. Written at the time of the implementation of the monastic reforms of Benedict of Aniane, Radbert's texts can be read as responses to the imposition of a stricter form of claustration on women's communities. Drawing on the patristic model of Jerome and Eustochium in particular, the spirituality of these texts stresses the contributions of religious women through intercessory prayer, liturgy, and correct doctrine. Radbert alternately emphasizes the important role played by widows in Carolingian religious houses and encourages younger members not to leave the shelter of the religious life. In particular, Radbert's commentary on Psalm 44 (45) meditates on a text that would have been significant at the nuns' consecrations, deliberately employing language that would have paralleled the conventions of secular marriage. In conclusion, Radbert's three texts for Carolingian nuns bear interesting resemblances to twelfth-century Cistercian spirituality.

This article examines the language policies of sixteenth-century Mexico, aiming more generally to illuminate efforts by Mexican bishops to foster conversions to Christianity. At various points throughout the colonial era, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church propagated the use of Castilian among Amerindians; leaders of these institutions, however, also encouraged priests to study indigenous languages. That Spanish authorities appear to have never settled on a firm language policy has puzzled modern scholars, who have viewed the Crown and its churchmen as vacillating between “pro-indigenous” and “pro-Castilian” sentiments. This article suggests, however, that Mexico's bishops intentionally extended simultaneous support to both indigenous languages and Castilian. Church and Crown officials tended to avoid firm ideological commitments to one language; instead they made practical decisions, concluding that different contexts called for distinct languages. An examination of the decisions made by leading churchmen offers insight into how they helped to create a Spanish-American religious landscape in which both indigenous and Spanish elements co-existed.

This article examines Galileo's confrontations with the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition in light of the rules and technicalities of inquisitorial procedure as set forth in the Corpus juris canonici, officially issued in 1582 under the auspices of Pope Gregory XIII. The primary decretal governing inquisition comes from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which also established the regulations of sacramental confession and the seal of secrecy. Inquisition was intended for the prosecution of public crimes, but when it was adapted to pursuing heresy, the rights of suspects were regularly disregarded, and, rather than being charged with public crimes, they were forced to incriminate themselves, even on secret deeds and previously unuttered beliefs. When first summoned in 1616, Galileo was not questioned, but merely warned not to espouse heliocentrism. In 1632, Holy Office investigations resulted in a summons, and when he appeared in April 1633, he was interrogated without being charged. His formal trial took place on May 10, and his guilty plea of favoring heliocentrism without heretical intention triggered an automatic examination of his private beliefs under torture (in his case, threat of torture), a new procedure adopted by the Holy Office around the turn of the seventeenth century.

This article explores the relationship between the idealization of the Bible and the material characteristics of printed bibles among the Disciples of Christ in the early nineteenth century. The Disciples were founded on the principles of biblical primitivism: they revered the “pure” Bible as the sole source for proper faith and practice. The tenacity with which Disciples emphasized their allegiance to an idealized, timeless Bible has obscured their attention to its physical manifestations and use as printed scripture. The timeless authority of the Bible was entangled with the historical contingencies of mere bibles, and the ways in which they dealt with these tensions offer important perspective on nineteenth-century bible culture. Scholars have treated primitivism as an ahistorical impulse—the idealization of the New Testament church as a mythical sacred era outside of time that could be perpetually inhabited. By contrast, through an examination of the New Testaments edited and published by Disciples leader Alexander Campbell and the heavily-annotated preaching bible of Thomas Allen, an early Disciples preacher, I argue that in seeking to recover the New Testament era through historicized understandings of scripture, primitivists like Campbell and Allen situated the early church itself firmly within historical, not primordial, time.

Pondering the miraculous deeds of the early Christian saints and martyrs in his City of God, St. Augustine queried, “Why can the dead do such great things?”1 Robert Bartlett's magisterial study takes up this question by examining the veneration of the holy dead from the age of the martyrs through the Protestant Reformation. While its center of gravity is medieval Europe, the book's long scope and comparative dimensions make it relevant to historians and scholars of religion across a broad chronological and geographic spectrum. Alongside its erudition, Bartlett's study is also remarkably accessible—full of engaging stories, good humor, and profound insight into human nature as well as social practice.

Robert Bartlett's book is devoted to one question that, at first glance, is deceptively simple: Why Can the Dead do Such Great Things? The question, it turns out, requires an extensive answer in the course of just under 800 pages. They are supported by forty-four pages of bibliography of primary sources, which are quoted with preference in the relatively minimal footnotes (something the general readership will note with gratitude), and fifty-five pages that list the secondary literature (whose existence will gladden the hearts of the scholarly readers) that constitute the foundation of this scholarly edifice, although—very reasonably—only sparingly quoted.

The title of Robert Bartlett's book on saints, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, comes from Saint Augustine, who thought of heaven as a preeminently social environment. It is thus easy to entertain a fantasy about a conversation among saints in heaven. One saint boasts that his feast day has a higher liturgical ranking than the others'. This provokes a second saint to point out that the first may have a grand feast day, but is not, like himself, the subject of a properly papal canonization. A third saint is proud of his artistic representations. A fourth points out that he is so important that he is mentioned in Robert Bartlett's latest book. But this boast backfires. All the saints burst into laughter. As one of them points out, “That's nothing special—we're all in Bartlett's book! He didn't miss any of us!”

Robert Bartlett's book on the cult of saints in the Middle Ages clearly constitutes a major achievement. Its scope is vast; its approach ranges from the chronological to the thematic; it embraces many cultural, as well as theological and religious, aspects of the subject. Finally, it is informed by a rich comparative vision that includes wide-ranging discussion of other religions.

I am very grateful to the three discussants, not only, of course, for having agreeable things to say about the book, but also for the way they have used their reflections on the subject to extend and develop it.