The stark antithesis between the secular and the religious has been effectively challenged by scholarship of early modern Italy, which has shown the degree to which these fields necessarily overlapped. Nevertheless, studies of early modern female devotion, especially within convents, often present women as caught between competing claims of kinship and clerical authority, a conflict between family and convent, an opposition between the secular and the divine. This paper argues that within Neapolitan conventual circles, at least, nuns' noble blood was regarded as enhancing the spiritual value of their convents, and that, on the whole, the way in which the Decrees of the Council of Trent were interpreted served to “aristocratize” convents. Something of a fusion occurred between nobility and spirituality in women. This paper relates this fusion to discourses on nobility and to the aristocratization of convent culture after enclosure at Trent, examining how it marked post-Tridentine Neapolitan convent architecture and urbanism. In short, I argue that nuns' nobility enhanced the spiritual value of Neapolitan convents after Trent, and that such status was communicated discursively, architecturally, and urbanistically.

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!

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.

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.

This essay brings to light how the establishment of the Apostolic Delegation to Palestine, Cyprus, and Transjordan (1929) marked a turning point in the Catholic presence in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate. Based on several unexplored archival sources, this paper analyzes the factors driving the creation of the new Apostolic Delegation and the consequences it produced in the Holy See's Middle and Near Eastern policies. The difficult relationship among various Catholic institutions in Palestine and the necessity to adapt the Catholic presence in that region to the new political situation caused the Vatican to send an apostolic visitor (1925) and then to establish direct representation of the Holy See in Jerusalem (1929). This last decision contributed to sounder relations with the British administration and functioned to limit the involvement of European Catholic powers (primarily France and Italy) in church affairs. At the same time, it highlighted the Vatican's will to reinforce the role of the Christian Arab clergy in Palestine while limiting that of European missionaries. This analysis creates a clearer picture of how the establishment of the Apostolic Delegation to Palestine, Cyprus, and Transjordan was at the same time the cause and effect of an important shift in the Catholic perception of Palestine.

Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were strikingly different. Before removal, Cherokee printers emulated Anglo-Protestant prototypes in terms of dimensions, layout, and typography. The goal was to increase the likelihood of staying on their lands by winning white patrons and nudging Cherokee readers to see themselves as acculturated reading subjects. After removal, Cherokee printers rethought acculturation as a strategy. They redesigned Poor Sarah to turn away from white audiences and instead address the Cherokee community and its needs. Attention to the evolving materialities of Poor Sarah reveals Cherokee Christian printing as a key site of Indigenous media theory and part of Cherokee Nation's repertory of political action in response to US imperialism and settler colonialism.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

The Carolingian period, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries, was dynamic and decisive in European religious history. The ruling dynasty and the clerical elite promoted wave after wave of reform that I call “unifying,” “specifying,” and “sanctifying.” This presidential address argues that religion was the key unifying and universalizing force in the Carolingian world; that the Carolingians were obsessed with doing things the right way—usually the Roman way; and that the Carolingians sought to inculcate Christian behavior more than religious knowledge. The address concludes by arguing that the Carolingians put a markedly European stamp on Christianity and that they Romanized Christianity well before the papacy attempted to do so.

By the time that Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, completed the first edition of his Historia Anglorum, about 1129, four reform councils had made it quite clear, even to the stubbornly resistant English clergy, that subdeacons, deacons and priests should not have wives, concubines or sons with clerical ambitions. Henry, who had uncanonically succeeded his father, Nicholas, in his archdeaconry, was by 1129 about forty-five years old and had at least one son, probably in minor orders. His major literary works, Historia Anglorum and the epistle De Contemptu Mundi, contain explicit information about his father and the succession of the archdeaconry of Huntingdon, but Henry's careful silence has kept several further generations of this clerical family virtually hidden from readers. Needless to say, he was not pleased with the notions of clerical celibacy that some, in increasing numbers during his lifetime, chose to call reform. Modified by a wary reluctance to state his objections openly, Henry's angry inability to accept that central issue of Gregorian reform shaped his account of the introduction of Gregorian reform to England with insinuation, slander and prevaricating silence. The particular interest of Henry of Huntingdon's treatment of reform councils and reformers lies in its tense delineation of the discomfort felt by many of the higher clergy and their families caught when the reform ideal of celibacy was no longer a startling novelty, but was still not universally accepted, not yet venerable as custom, certainly not easy.

During the nineteenth century, over 300 missionary periodicals were established in Britain, along with hundreds in North America, Europe, and the colonial world, yet little has been written about the rationale behind their establishment. From their beginnings as sources of intelligence, periodicals developed into vehicles of influence by the first decades of the nineteenth century, with missionary organizations also using this reduplicated commodity to deliberately persuade and mold public attitudes. This article examines some thirty inaugural editorials and first volume prefaces to Protestant missionary periodicals, including those from “new series,” to uncover how editors justified their establishment to their potential readership.

This essay explores the ongoing debates about the character of early Cistercian monasticism, the dating of early Cistercian documents, and assumptions about the Cistercians’ place in eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic “reform.” It analyzes the Cistercians’ narratives of their foundation in relation to particular moments in the twelfth-century history of the order, drawing on and elaborating recent theories about the dating of these documents. Although the Cistercians often seem the quintessential example of “reformed monasticism,” this essay argues that the earliest Cistercians did not present themselves as reformers but only gradually developed a rhetoric of reform over the course of the twelfth century. Finally, it suggests that reform is less a specific set of changes than it is a rhetorical use of the past that authenticates current practices and affirms that these interpretations of the past must be right and true.

Anabaptism was a religious movement of the little people of village and town, affecting in the end almost the whole area of the Germanic dialects from the Tyrol to Flanders, from Alsace to Prussia. Anabaptism, for all its, or perhaps precisely because of its, dissociation from principality and privilege, was more exclusively a Germanic movement than even Lutheranism; for the latter could at least go beyond the Germanic dialects to express itself in a Scandinavian or Slavic tongue; and, of course, Anabaptism was far less international than the Reformed movement. The linguistic containment of Anabaptism is all the more remarkable for the reason that in principle Anabaptism was much more world-minded and mission-minded—because of the seriousness with which it took the great commission— than any variety of the Magisterial Reformation. Yet when it moved beyond the deeply sinused speech frontier to the East, for example, it did so in ethnically and linguistically closed colonies in Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere. Documents from the pens of Anabaptists in French, a Scandinavian tongue, Polish, Czech, or Italian, surviving from the Reformation Era, could be held between two fingers; while the surviving Anabaptist writings in the international language of the Humanists and the Reformers are even fewer. (In contrast, a good deal of the surviving literary corpus of the Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and especially of the Evangelical Rationalists is in Latin, as well as in the Romance and Slavic tongues and Hungarian.) The little people of Anabaptism were not without recruits and even leadership from former priests and monks with their Latin and an occasional patrician with his Humanist training, but the lingua franca of Anabaptism was German, although progressive modification in idiom was necessary as the radical evangelical gospel was proclaimed by preacher or epistle from North to South.

The story of learning in the Middle Ages has been patiently reconstructed from a great many sources, and one of its principal themes has rightly been the preeminent service of the Christian Church in the preservation of classical writings, the stimulation of thought, and the instruction of its members. The distinction is not always carefully drawn, however, between the enthusiasm felt by clerical individuals and the institutional policies of the Church. A detailed enumeration and analysis of its official pronouncements about education may qualify the general impression and, by eliminating certain misconceptions, leave a clearer path for tracing the rise of schools after the barbarian invasions. The legislation will not reveal the whole attitude of the ecclesiastics, since the Middle Ages were less likely to define their institutions than we are, but it provides an indication that should not be minimized.