Faced with suspicion, hostility and repression, yet small in number and dedicated increasingly to peaceful principles, the early Quakers had recourse to the press. They published detailed accounts of their persecutions and a large number of purely theological treatises which are relatively well known. They also published a literature of defense which, although widely cited, has not until now been the subject of systematic study. In these tracts they refuted charges that they were emissaries of Rome and enemies of the established order; justified their refusal to do “hat honor”, to take oaths, to pay tithes and to participate in the rituals of an established church; pleaded for liberty of conscience; threatened their opponents with God's wrath; and encouraged each other to stand fast in adversity. The literature of defense grew rapidly in the decade before the Restoration and declined steadily in the decade or so thereafter.

Even the most casual reader will be wrenched up short by the title of Giuseppe Luigi Dossetti's superb book, ll Simbolo [!] di Nicea e di Costantinopoli. How is it possible to speak as if Christendom's first two ecumenical councils produced the same creed? One automatically expects i simboli, but Dossetti insists that he means what he says, and, while he relies upon the works of Lebon, Kelly and Ritter for the primary exposition of the theory, he makes his critical edition of the texts and witnesses to the creeds of Nicea and Constantinople go far to support his title's contention.

In the two decades from 1590 to 1610, there were three major events in the life of the Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands. In theology there was the outbreak of the so-called Arminian controversy over predestination and related issues, culminating in the polarizing of the Dutch Reformed Church into Remonstrant and Contra-remonstrant parties. In economics there was the transition from late-medieval and intra-European trade patterns to the new global and colonial patterns of the Dutch East India Company. In politics there was the signing of a truce with Spain, with the unprecedented granting of independence to a new nation by a great power.

If after many years of scholarship and controversy, the French Revolution is to be seen, with Georges Lefebvre, as preeminently the revolution of equality, and its most important achievement the substitution of a bourgeois and individualistic social order for the former aristocratic and corporatist one, the nature of eighteenth-century corporate or “constituted bodies” becomes a major area for research. There are many questions which the historian would like to ask about these aristocratic institutions, but generally these questions fall into two groups: the relationship of these bodies to society as a whole, and their inner cohesiveness. By examining the taxation of the clergy in eighteenth-century France, we investigate the chief temporal characteristic of the ecclesiastical estate and are in a position to evaluate both its relationship to French society as a whole and its internal strengths and weaknesses.

In the American self-consciousness from its beginning to the present there has existed a firm conviction that this nation is destined, either by divine decree or circumstances, for a unique place among the peoples of the earth. One form of this is the assumption that the United States will provide the great example which others will want to follow. The classic expression of this was given by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, but equally valid ones can be found in the words of modern Americans. Winthrop said:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

In June 1808, at the age of fourteen, Eunice Bathrick confessed her sins and joined the Shakers (also known as the Believers), a celibate religious community founded by Ann Lee in the late eighteenth century. Although largely unknown to modern scholars, Bathrick played many roles in the Shaker village of Harvard, Massachusetts, where she lived her entire Shaker life. A prolific visionist, a creative thinker, and a dedicated writer, she became an authoritative figure at Harvard and a symbol of the empowering opportunities for women found within the religious structure, particularly the spirituality, of Shakerism. Her work—in the form of an autobiography, several biographies, visions and spirit messages, oral histories, hymn collections, and a web of correspondence with other Shakers and the outside world—provides a unique opportunity to study both this interrelationship between gender, spirituality, and female empowerment in Shaker communities and Bathrick's own individual spiritual journey as a Shaker sister.

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.

Late in 1888, a swift and public rift occurred between Mary Baker Eddy and her student Ursula N. Gestefeld. Historians agree it was a significant break, generally glossing its cause as a personal quarrel later codified in separate organizations: Eddy's Church of Christ, Scientist, reorganized in 1892, and Gestefeld's Church of the New Thought. This article finds, however, that the rift between Eddy and Gestefeld is best explained in terms of theology and religious practice. The two expressed incompatible views of Christianity and its relationship to Theosophy, eclecticism, truth, ethics, ambiguity, and special revelation. They ultimately codified these profound religious differences, not merely personal quarrels, in their distinct churches. The article's findings cause us to rethink the scope and shape of Eddy's self-professed Christianity; the common characterization of her as excluding powerful women from her church for authoritarian reasons; and the terrain occupied by the traditions and churches Eddy and Gestefeld subsequently developed. I show that in their case, contact resulted not in combination but in conversation and contestation, and ultimately perhaps in co-existence. This builds on and sharpens the theoretics describing the religious milieu in which they operated.

“The Catholic Worker movement is evolving in ways its founders didn't anticipate,” declared a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, explaining that the movement has evolved from a community of single people to a network that includes many family-centered houses of hospitality. Such media perceptions are widely shared by Catholic Worker families. “In 1933,” explained Julia Occhiogrosso of the Las Vegas Catholic Worker, “Dorothy [Day] didn't give us models for families who want to minister to the poor, Catholic Worker style.” These claims demand a more sustained historical analysis. Just how new are Catholic Worker families? What historical factors contributed to their emergence? Who did create the models for the dozens of families that today are feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoners, and bending swords into plowshares?

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.

The religious history of World War II in the U.S. has long been dominated by the theme of pluralism. The trials of mobilization and battle fostered inter-religious cooperation. Against a backdrop of Nazi intolerance and godless communism, these collaborative experiences would, in the postwar years, help mute religious conflict and amplify a “Judeo-Christian” consensus. This framing, while compelling, has deflected attention from the distinctive modes with which religious Americans interpreted the war. The work of the National Catholic Community Service (the Catholic arm of the United Service Organizations) illustrates the ways Catholics framed the war as a religious matter. In seeking to build Catholic bridges across the separations of wartime, Catholics amplified the unique moral and spiritual means of their tradition. Two themes—sacramental presence and moral exceptionalism—dominated Catholics' efforts to Catholicize the war. Exploring these efforts reveals the religious arenas within which Catholic soldiers, war workers, and their families were invited to work out their sense of the war and their responsibilities as Catholics and Americans. The stories—often strikingly indifferent or even hostile to the pluralist “consensus”—shed new light on the war and on the history of religious difference in the U.S.

Our fellow historian Peter Brown reports that according to a memoir written, sometime around 1900 by a contemporary of Benedetto Croce, the eminent Italian philosopher, Croce challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysics. What a startling report that makes you eager to turn the page—as in a John Gresham volume—in order to find out what happened. But nothing more is said in the book, compelling the conclusion that for the author, this was routine, unimportant, and even normal for professors to challenge each other to deadly duels. He must have thought that no explanation was necessary. And so a single sentence stands alone, tantalizing, unexplained—for contemporaries commonplace; for posterity altogether startling. What a splendid introduction to how to see the past offered us by Peter Brown!