In 498, four days after the death of Pope Anastasius II, two men were elected and consecrated bishop of Rome on the one day, the deacon Symmachus and the archpriest Laurentius. Fighting broke out between their supporters and the dispute was referred to Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, who declared that Symmachus was to be pope. A synod held in 499 accepted him as pope and passed legislation on church government; it awarded to Laurentius the see of Nuceria. But trouble soon broke out again when Symmachus was accused of improper relations with women, squandering church property and celebrating Easter on the wrong date. While on his way to Ravenna, where Theodoric had summoned him to give an account of himself, he became convinced that he was being framed, and returned secretly to Rome by night without completing his journey. Theodoric reacted by appointing Bishop Peter of Altinum as visitor of the Roman see, but this became a further source of controversy. At some stage Laurentius returned to Rome. Rioting broke out again, with clergy being killed and Symmachus himself being attacked on one occasion. Two more synods failed to pacify in the city or put an end to the schism. This only came years later, in 507 or 508, when Theodoric ordered Festus, Laurentius' noble patron, to hand over the churches of Rome, which had been held by Laurentius, to Symmachus. Laurentius retired to Festus' estates, leaving Symmachus to preside over a reasonably peaceful and united church until his death in 514.

The Black Death arrived in southern France, at Marseille, in January 1348. It then spread westward, reaching Carcassonne by February and Perpignan by March. There is no exact chronology of the outbreak of the plague in Montpellier. However, the disease probably appeared by March 1348, since it spread along trade routes and the town was considerably closer to Marseille than both Carcassonne and Perpignan. The recorded toll of the Black Death in Montpellier at first seems great enough to account for any changes in the behavior of the population in the plague year. For this commercial and financial capital of Lower Languedoc, 1348 was generally termed “lan de la mortalidat.”

In his book Two Tudor Conspiracies, D. M. Loades challenged the traditional view among historians that the Wyatt rebellion was influenced by Protestant concerns over the Catholic policies of Mary Tudor. In Loades' account of the event, religion played no prominent part; the conspirators were secular and anti-clerical, but otherwise their religious convictions remain “shadowy.” Loades contends that apart from William Thomas, the well-known Protestant enthusiast, “all had conformed without protest under Edward, and those still alive were to do so again under Elizabeth, but throughout the period of the rebellion and trials which followed it, all protested their loyalty to the Catholic Church.” The real reasons for the revolt, he asserts, were secular and political—namely, fear of foreign domination through the Queen's intended marriage to Philip of Spain.

Jacob Burckhardt somewhat naively recorded that when he first came to the University of Berlin to study history, his eyes opened wide with astonishment at the first lectures he heard by Leopold von Ranke, Gustav Droysen and Philipp August Böckh. He realized that the same thing had befallen him as befell the knight Don Quixote, for he had loved his science on hearsay and suddenly here it was appearing before him in gigantic proportions and he had to lower his eyes. The occasion of delivering a presidential address to an august society of scholars, following on the podium historians of great distinction, and speaking on a topic of such magnitude is an equally humbling experience.

In 1710 Archbishop John Sharp of York of the Church of England and Daniel Ernst Jablonski of Prussia began a dialogue hoping for the possible union of their respective churches. They wanted to bring about a junction of the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Prussia through the adoption of the Anglican liturgy and episcopal polity and an organic union between this Prussian church and the Church of England, perhaps including other Protestant churches as well. The progress of this effort surprised even the men most dedicated to it, and it appeared likely that they could forge an association within a short time. Yet, in the end these churchmen were disappointed and their negotiations came to naught. The reasons, however, were not religious in nature; indeed, there seemed to be no religious impediment to the effort at all. Although the ministers of both Queen Anne and King Frederick expressed interest in the discussions, political considerations relating to the English exertions to end the war of Spanish Succession led to the failure.

When Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, regained his ducal throne in May of 1534, he immediately took steps to institute the Reformation in Württmberg. Probably because of his own divided loyalties, he asked both Lutherans and Swiss-Reformed Protestants to come to Württemberg. From the outset, however, their mutual opposition, combined with determined Roman Catholic resistance in some areas, led to difficulties beyond Ulrich's expectations. The ducal commissioners for the Reformation in the southern half of Württemberg was Ambrosius Blarer, the reformer of Constance and a firm ally of both Martin Bucer and Zurich. Part of his responsibility was the University of Tübingen, a center of particularly strong Roman Catholic opposition to the Reformation. Blarer appealed to Duke Ulrich for assistance, asking for the Basel Greek scholar Simon Grynaeus, another Swiss partisan. Ulrich, however, took far more dramatic steps to reform the University of Tübingen. Under instructions from Ulrich, Chancellor Knoder and Erhard Schnepff, Blarer's counterpart in northern Württemberg, wrote to Philip Melanchthon, requesting that he return to his homeland to teach in the University of Tübingen, his alma mater.

Manuscript research is an endeavor filled with suspense; often made more difficult by physical labor and severe weather, the scholar's research may prove fruitless, or it may yield an unknown text which reveals again the gaps in scholars' knowledge of ancient Christian tests.

The first letter in Pope Innocent III's register of his second year was Vergentis in senium, a letter which he sent to the city of Viterbo in March, 1199. The decretal reflected Innocent's growing concern with heresy in the papal states and established new and more stringent penalties for those who rejected or subverted the Christian faith. In Vergentis, perhaps following the Roman lawyer Placentinus, Innocent imposed the traditional spiritual punishment of excommunication on heretics, equated heresy with lese majesty, and applied to convicted heretics the sanctions for treason in Roman law: complete confiscation of goods, even disinheriting innocent children. The punishment was fitting, Innocent observed, because a heretic injured celestial majesty, a crime far more heinous than any offense committed against temporal authority. Since the heretics in Viterbo continued to demand his attention later in his pontificate, we do not know how effective Innocent's decree was, but Vergentis did establish a precedent for papal action throughout Christendom. In order to root out all vestiges of heresy, Innocent extended the provisions of the decretal from the heretics themselves to their “supporters, defenders, and harborers.” The decretal marked the first firm step of his increasingly grim policy to use all of the resources of the church to extirpate heresy from Christian lands. The step from Viterbo to the Albigensian crusade was a short one. And, since heresy was an ecclesiastical crime, both laymen and clerics who were accused of heresy had their cases heard in ecclesiastical courts, giving lawyers another item to add to the list of cases in which the pope could exercise jurisdiction in the secular world.

Urbanization was the child of the industrial revolution. Born in the previous century, urban life rapidly matured in the nineteenth. The growth of industrial centers such as Glasgow placed an unbearable strain on the existing parochial system as people who had been reared in rural ways were thrust into urban situations alien to rural interests. One observer described the movement of the population from country to town as “a flood which swept away all the old relations of urban and rural districts.” The result of this social upheaval was twofold: a widespread attitude of religious disinterest and the appearance of social vices on a large scale. To the staid but wary religious community, urbanization appeared to be the basis of irreligion and moral decadence.

It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation.

In one of the great purple passages of nineteenth-century English historiography, Thomas Babington Macauley in his review of Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes declared the papacy to be the western institution most worthy of historical study. Accordingly, historians have devoted innumerable pages to the analysis of papal politics, ideology, finances, and many other areas. However, there are still aspects of the history of the papacy that have been seriously neglected.

Acceptance of providence, the belief that an ultimate being determines the course of events, has always created problems for moralists and advocates of free will, and for obivous reasons. If any events has been foreordained, how can hemans be free? If all is determined, why should humans try to do what is right? Aside from the philosophical questions raised by a belief in provedence, however, scholars such as the distinguished economists Jacob Viner have begun to examine the doctrine of providence from the point of view of its broad ideological and social impact. Though Professor Viner modestly claimed that his study of providence was simply an intellectual history pursued for its own sake, he demonstrated many of the doctrine's implications for early modern thought and social structures. Similar emphasis on the significance of the early modern idea of providence is also found in Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic.

The Swiss Brethren originated “in, with and under” the Reformation. They lacked the traditional mystical thought patterns which were so influential for Thomas Müntzer, Hans Hut and Hans Denck and their followers in South and Central Germany. Although they possessed a vivid apocalyptic sense, which they shared with many of the Reformers, they did not permit their eschatological expectancy to crystallize into the concrete and violent prophecies of a Hans Hut or a Melchior Hoffman. Thus they avoided the chiliasm which at first stimulated, but eventually blighted, German and Dutch Anabaptism. They did not move from sectarian congregations to communalism like the Hutterites, with the result that in the later sixteenth century they were preyed upon and denounced by Hutterite missionaries anxious to lead their members to the promised land. They were willing to regard the Christological speculations of the Melchiorites as adiaphora, but Menno Simons remained too much a Melchiorite to accept the hand of brotherhood which they extended from Strassburg. Despite their impulses toward “Anabaptist ecumenicism,” followers of that other would-be Anabaptist ecumenicist, Pilgram Marpeck, denounced them in the Kunstbuch as a “harmful and corrupting sect” which sought Christ “outside the human heart … in the Scriptures or other dead creatures.” The relations of the Swiss Brethren to the German and Swiss Reformations, their relations to other Anabaptist groups and the phases of their development remain historical problems, in some cases controverted, in others insufficiently studied.

In the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (entry for Tuesday, August 17) Boswell relates that at a meeting with Dr Johnson the poet Blacklock spoke “with apparent uneasiness” about uncertainty in morals and religion.

The Americanist crisis in the last decade of the nineteenth century climaxed the attempt of a group of liberal prelates and their associates to adapt Roman Catholicism to democratic institutions and values. Almost twenty years ago Robert Cross put this complex movement within the context of a growing American Catholic liberalism in the postbellum period. The full dimensions of that liberalism are still coming into focus as archival materials and unpublished sources become more available to the historian. The recent discovery of a remarkable association of New York priests shows another facet of the Americanist controversy that better enables us to appreciate the peculiar lines that the episcopal struggle assumed.

Whitney R. Cross's The Burned-over District:. The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850, first published in 1950 by Cornell University Press, has had a puzzling reception from the scholarly world. On the one hand, its quantity of research and quality of insight earned the book a reputation as one of the principal studies of innovative religion in America. On the other hand, despite the frequency with which historians have cited it, until recently no one has attempted a systematic consideration of its hypotheses and conclusions.

In 1896 Andrew D. White published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a work which had consumed his scholarly passion for twenty years. His original interest in the subject stemmed from his difficulties, while President of Cornell, with Protestant sectarian critics. During those years, he answered opponents somewhat guardedly in lectures and letters to religious publications, but at the same time he began research on what he hoped would he his magnum opus, a work to demonstrate the futility of attempts by religious advocates to prohibit scientific inquiry and to defend essential Christian truths. “I wish the clergy to read it,” he told historian George Lincoln Burr, “and if they like to attack it, and no university on my shoulders.”

Although the United States had extensive commercial contacts with the Spanish-owned Philippine Islands early in the nineteenth century, interest in them declined sharply by the 1890s. But with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and Commodore George Dewey's defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila the Philippines reappeared on the American horizon. At the peace negotiations the United States demanded, and received, the islands.

In the settlements of New York State in the early nineteenth century two movements of the American spirit converged toward the common end of the creation of a just social order for the happiness of man and the glory of God. The revival and the institution of legal order grew and flourished from a common root, the conviction that a renewed national community could be formed only on the basis of respect for law. The Biblical promise of millennial bliss fervently extended by the revivalists and the Constitutional promise of domestic tranquillity recited by the lawyers were both dependent for their fulfillment on the people's submission to regulations, whether religious or civil. The interest in law as the basis of “settling things” with both God and one's neighbors implied a confidence in the human ability to understand and to honor the principles by which the affairs of God and men are rightfully ordered.

Whatever else may be said about the Reverend William Dwight Porter Bliss, his reform energy was indefatigable. From the Haymarket Affair until the Red Scare, he was instrumental in organizing, researching, editing, publishing and lecturing on behalf of the coming of God's Kingdom. Along with Walter Rauschenbusch and George Herron, Bliss was certainly one of the most prominent spokesmen for the left wing of the Social Gospel.