“We confirm with all our authority, to the abbot of that house, everything that our predecessors as popes granted them in writing, as well as everything in the letters of our beloved son Charlemagne … that all the possessions of the monastery be under the protection and defense of inviolable apostolic privilege, that is everything that has been or will be given to that church.” Thus read a papal privilege created in the second half of the eleventh century at the Benedictine monastery of Montier-en-Der, a privilege that purported to have been given to the monks three centuries earlier. By forging papal documents in a time of difficulties, the monks sought to demonstrate that they had powerful allies, who would help them even if the local counts and bishops did not.

[God] sees there where no man sees, because in punishing sin he considers not the deed but the mind, just as conversely we consider not the mind which we do not see but the deed which we know.… God is said to be the prover and the judge of the heart… that is, of all the intentions which come from an affection of the soul or from a weakness or a pleasure of the flesh.

In 1263 Bonaventure of Bagnoreggio, Minister General of the Franciscan order, complained about recent turmoil between the Friars Minor and Franciscan nuns in a letter addressed to the Provincial Minister of Aragon: “You are undoubtedly aware, dear Brother, just how much our Order has been plagued up to now with threats, troubles, and litigation occasioned by the monasteries of the Order of Saint Clare. This has come to the point where they have petitioned the court of the Supreme Pontiff alleging, among other charges against us, that the customary services provided for them by our brothers are in fact prescribed by law; thus our brothers have proposed to have nothing more to do with them unless they first recognize our complete freedom by public written documents sent to the Holy Father.”

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to Erasmus's concept of history. This is understandable since Erasmus is not usually considered a historian and is certainly not ranked with humanist historians such as Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Guicciardini. Nevertheless, Erasmus's contribution to Renaissance historical scholarship is considerable.As an editor of texts he constantly busied himself with establishing the most accurate readings and separating genuine from spurious works. His patristic editions as well as his five editions of the New Testament are monuments not only to a highly refined literary analysis but also to a sophisticated historical erudition.

Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768–1834) and Elizabeth (1771–1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead—he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops—then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. Soon the sisters came to write about faith, slavery, and freedom. Anne and Elizabeth Hart were moderate opponents of slavery, not abolitionists but meliorationists. When compared to their black American, British, and West African contemporaries, the Hart sisters illuminate the birth of a black antislavery Christianity in the late eighteenth century precisely because they never became abolitionists. The Hart sisters shared with their black contemporaries a vivid sense of racial identity and evangelical Christianity. Yet as meliorationists, the Hart sisters did not oppose slavery as an institution, but rather the vice it spread into the lives of blacks. The difference between the Hart sisters and their contemporaries such as Richard Allen, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, and John Marrant—all luminaries of black abolitionism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—was that the abolitionists felt themselves citizens of a modern nation-state characterized by power that could be used against slave traders and slaveholders. The Hart sisters never thought of themselves as citizens and abjured political means, including revolution, of ending slavery. This essay aims to describe the Hart sisters' faith and antislavery activity and to analyze the difference between meliorationism and abolitionism in terms of a black writer's ability or inability to identify as a citizen of a modern nation-state.

Everywhere the first impulse to social action is given as a rule by real interests, i.e., by political and economic interests. Ideal interests lend wings to these real interests, give them a spiritual meaning, and serve to justify them. Man does not live by bread alone. He wants to have a good conscience as he pursues his life-interests. And in pursuing them he develops his capacities to the highest extent only if he believes that in so doing he serves a higher rather than a purely egotistic purpose. Interests without such “spiritual wings” are lame; but on the other hand, ideas can win out in history only if and insofar as they are associated with real interest