Any consideration of the half-millennium of Western European popular enthusiasm from ca. 1000 to ca. 1500—beginning, say, in 994 at the Council of Anse in Burgundy with the intervention of Abbot Odilo of Cluny in the Peace of God movement, and terminating (again with an arbitrary date) on May 23, 1498, in Florence, with the hanging and burning of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, O.P.—must involve the role of the regular clergy, the professed religious of Latin Christendom. Medieval collective religious enthusiasm, especially when it was not inaugurated by ecclesiastical authority, was often divisive, attracting converts and distracting or repelling others. Monks and friars could not remain indifferent to such movements. For one thing, if their stance was deemed inappropriate, their relationship with the laity (perhaps fellow townsfolk), or the papacy, or their rich and powerful benefactors might be compromised. Nor was their role necessarily that of spectators. Members of the regular clergy sometimes participated in medieval revivals. Possibly still more important is the fact that during most of our period the regulars had the lion's share of chronicling popular enthusiasm. It is in their historical writings that medieval popular religious revivals were mythologized and memorialized. Our view of such movements, therefore, has been shaped by their perceptions and prejudices. Their narratives also provide us with a rich source from which to gauge their interpretations of medieval revivalism. For they make no attempt to conceal their attitudes toward lay enthusiasts—their suspicion, animosity, fear, approbation, sympathy, empathy.

The purpose of this article is to address the controversial issue of the status of the Utraquist Church in the Kingdom of Bohemia in consequence of the drafting of the Bohemian Confession in 1575. The chronological scope is limited to the period up to 1609, when the issuance of the Letter of Majesty in 1609 formalized the gentlemen's agreement of 1575 and altered the ecclesiastical structure accordingly. According to Czech historiography, the parliamentary action of 1575– which granted toleration, albeit tacit and conditional, to the Lutherans and the Bohemian Brethren—represented a moment of truth for traditional Utraquism, which dated to the original Bohemian Reformation. On the one hand, the Utraquists' choice was to reaffirm its late medieval reformist tradition that preserved the traditional liturgy (including the seven sacraments), a belief in the sacramental episcopate and priesthood in a historic apostolic succession, and the belief in the efficaciousness of good works in the drama of salvation. On the other hand, their choice was to embrace the Lutheran Reformation, which rejected all the doctrines just enumerated.

We know relatively little about prophecies or “exercises” that early Elizabethan reformers devised as in-service training. Nearly all textbooks report that Archbishop Grindal objected to government orders that prophesying be suppressed, for, in 1576, his reservations cost him the queen's and regime's confidence. Yet the suppressed exercises have lately been depicted as tame Elizabethan adaptations of continental practices that featured sermons delivered publicly but discussed only clerically. That was so in Zurich, Emden, and elsewhere, but I think that if we look at prophesying again, look, that is, at what the critics, patrons, and partisans said about the exercises in England, we will discover that lay involvement and initiative were just as subversive and disruptive as some thought at the time.

S. L. Ollard's 1926 study of the Church of England's understanding and practice of the rite of confirmation remains the most significant examination of this topic for the eighteenth century. He insisted that eighteenth-century Anglicans took a low view of the rite, contending that the religious consequences of the Glorious Revolution set the tone for Anglican sacramental views. That the church allowed three unconfirmed monarchs (William III and the first two Georges) to receive the Eucharist provided evidence of the neglect of this rite. Louis Weil more recently echoes Ollard's critique, suggesting that after 1660 Anglican writers “virtually ignored the rite.” Weil believes that interest in the rite was limited to Thomas Wilson, the eighteenth-century bishop of Sodor and Man, and a few like-minded members of the “old high church tradition.” Thus, according to most accounts, Anglicans gave little attention to confirmation until the nineteenth century, when the Tractarians supposedly rediscovered the importance of the rite. Ironically, Weil undermines his own position by pointing out that the only “concentrated material” on the rite in the Tracts for the Times was a reprinting of the work on confirmation by the eighteenth-century bishop of Sodor and Mann, Thomas Wilson.

Some dozen years ago, I began in collaboration with David Holmes, Dewey Wallace, Charles Wallace, and others to conduct tours of houses of worship during the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History. The challenge of these tours for me gradually metamorphosed from providing basic information on dates, architectural styles, and parish history highlights—all useful enough in themselves—to reading these buildings in the broader context of the urban built environment. Churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings do not appear in the vacuum that a slide presentation or text illustration might suggest. Rather, they are in a continual mute dialogue with their surroundings, which in the urban context tend to be other buildings of commercial or civic purpose. The context is also four-dimensional. Not only do religious buildings themselves undergo expansion, remodeling, and changes in denominational identity, but their neighbors frequently change even more rapidly.

In the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris there is a little guide for pilgrims that was given to the architect when he began work on the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp (1955), probably the most influential yet contentious building of the twentieth century (fig. 1). Within the guide, the section on the cult of Mary has been heavily underlined and in the margin is the word “feminism,” written by Le Corbusier, a very unusual departure for a man of his times. In this article I will examine the role of Mary in the work of Le Corbusier and discuss the way in which she is interpreted in the architecture of Ronchamp.