The English cleric John Colet (ca. 1467–1519) composed a commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius, the legendary disciple of Saint Paul. Colet approached the Dionysian text not as an artifact belonging to another time and place but as a living document, much as he approached St. Paul's Letters in his commentaries. His goal was to critique lapses in ecclesiastical virtue and to instill a spirit of personal and institutional reform by comparing the sacramental and hierarchical practices of the sixth-century Dionysian Church with those of his Church in England. This essay suggests a new path to understanding the distinctiveness of reforms advocated by Colet. By referring to specific elements, including the practices of baptism and the eucharist and the nature of the office of bishop, Colet was able, via Dionysius, to reveal alternative possibilities of reform by adopting patristic and, although perhaps unwittingly, Eastern Orthodox thought and practice. What has not been appreciated thus far is that Colet's Ecclesiastical Hierarchy produces for a Latin readership in England a neo-Patristic blueprint that resembles in significant details the living ecclesiology of the Christian East, which was coming to light in the West through the humanist restoration of patristic texts and debates among scholars in Italy over Union and Conciliarism.

This article aims to open up and overview some key questions surrounding the Italian Reformation. It argues that the Italian Reformation cannot be viewed as a closed book after the conclusion of the Council of Trent; instead there emerged new forms of engagement between Italy and Protestantism, both within and outside the peninsula. In particular, this article considers Protestant propaganda: the efforts by communities of exiles, especially the Genevan Italian congregation, in printing materials to send into Italy, and also sending personnel at critical junctures, all extremely sensitive to political and religious contexts. The French Wars of Religion provided an immediate model for what could be attempted in Italy, and so addressed sometimes delicate issues such as nicodemism and martyrdom, while also providing practical advice and support to Protestants in Italy. As such, this article shows that Italy was not partitioned by some religious “Iron Curtain” from the rest of Europe, but rather was still viewed as a potential battleground for international Calvinism.

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

John Locke and many others noted the vibrant political commentary emanating from the pulpit during the Glorious Revolution. Preachers from the full confessional spectrum in England, and especially in Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies, used occasional or state sermons to explain contemporary upheavals from the perspective of God's law, Natural law, and Civil law. Most surprising is the latter, clerical reference to civil history and ancient origins, which preachers used to answer contemporary questions of conquest and allegiance. Clergy revisited the origins and constitutional roots of the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scots, and Irish, and deployed histories of legendary kings and imaginary conquests to explain and justify the revolutionary events of 1688–1692. Sermons of this revolutionary era focused as much on civil as on sacred history, and sought their true origins in antiquity and the mists of myth. Episcopalian preachers, whether Church of Ireland, Scottish Episcopalian, or Church of England, seem to have been especially inspired by thanksgiving or fast days memorialized in the liturgical calendar to ponder the meaning of a deep historical narrative. Scots, Irish, and Massachusetts clergy claimed their respective immemorialism, as much as the English did theirs. But, as they re-stated competing Britannic constitutions and origin myths explicitly, they exposed imperial rifts and contradictions within the seemingly united claim of antiquity. By the beginning of the next reign and century, state sermons depended more upon reason and less upon a historicized mythic antiquity.

The rise of German academic institutions in the nineteenth century considerably altered the landscape of American higher education. American students of theology looked to Germany to develop their discipline, where they found model textbooks that gave directives in learning and piety, transforming academic and theological practice. With sensitivity to the history of the book and the history of the rich cultural traffic across the Atlantic, this article focuses on the reception in English translation of the important and widely read Swiss-German church historian Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, whose textbooks enjoyed a considerable audience in the United States by crossing ideological boundaries and unseating obdurate assumptions. By examining this reception in the United States and Britain and investigating those “transatlantic personalities” who played pivotal roles in bringing his ideas from the “Old World” to the “New,” this article demonstrates Hagenbach's lasting influence on the changing fields of history, church history, and academic theology in America. An “Atlantic” perspective on these themes offers new insights for our understanding of religion in the modern academy, the movement and translation of theological ideas in an age of steamship travel, and the surfacing of commonalities among ostensibly mismatched, if not outright conflicting, Protestant religious cultures.

George McCready Price (1870–1963) is best known as the Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist amateur geologist who pioneered the idea of a young earth in the early twentieth century. Price laid the foundation for modern “creation science,” which took off decades later, with the publication of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr.'s The Genesis Flood in 1961. Despite his extensive writings on the details of geology, however, Price admitted that his main objections to evolution were not scientific but “moral” and “philosophical”—the “fruits” of the “corrupt tree” of evolution. Historians have almost entirely neglected this aspect of Price's opus; yet, Price authored a series of works from 1902 to 1925 that, in increasingly alarming tones, blamed evolution for socialism and communism. This article analyzes these works by examining Price's Adventist background, his early experiences working and living in the United States, and the broader political context in which he wrote. It also assesses the impact of Price's political writings on subsequent generations of creationists and conservative evangelicals. Price should be seen as part of the long process by which a New Christian Right was forged from materials including creationism and anticommunism. He was not only a geologist but also a creationist politician.