The Council of Constance has presented a problem to propapal historians since its close. On the one hand, the council ended the Great Western Schism, establishing an accepted line of popes while condemning doctrinal errors attributed to John Wyclille and John Hus. On the other hand, its decrees, llaec Santa and Freqnens, issued to safeguard the work of reunification and that of reform, later were used to justify the attempt of the Council of Basel to enact an anticurial reform of the church. Haec Santa was exalted to the level of a dogmatic definition in order to justify the Council of Basel's deposition of Eugenius IV, the second undoubted pope in the line begun at Constance.

Twenty-five years ago, in the first of three now well-known lectures, R. W. Southern noted the “extremely slow penetration of Islam as an intellectually identifiable fact in Western minds.” Southern attributed this delay to the distance that separated Latin Christians from the Muslims. In the case of the northern Europeans, this distance was physical. After Poitiers, the military threat posed by Islam receded and assumed its place as only one among many peripheral challenges to the authority of the Carolingians and their successors. For the Christians of Spain, who lived within the boundaries of Islam, the distance was psychological. Out of their fear of cultural absorption, they closed their minds to the new religion and reacted with hostility against it. As a result, according to Southern, the first generations of Latin ecclesiastics who were in a position to assess Islam either did not bother to comprehend it or did so using only the most distorted information available, depending on which side of the Pyrenees they lived on.

As Wendy O'Flaherty has argued persuasively in her recent book, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that one is dreaming—by waking up; but it is not possible to verify that one is awake by falling asleep. The thought that one cannot verify the fact that one is awake but only only falsify the fact that one is asleep (by waking up) delivers something of a jolt to Western “common sense,” which typically takes for granted the distinctness of such categories as “real” and “unreal,”“conscious” and “unconscious,”“dream” and “waking life.” Yet, as O'Flaherty points out, we know that we cannot see ourselves seeing an illusion, just as we cannot verify the “reality” of ourselves in the moment when we are engaged in testing our reality.

Political success is measured according to the accomplishment of the goals determined by politicians. This definition poses a challenge to historians, for political aims often are ambiguous, and our knowledge of them incomplete. This problem becomes more acute with regard to the history of the papacy, whose asserted aims on the one hand, and its real policy on the other, often were characterized by inner contradictions.

It seems somewhat paradoxical that at the very time in the eleventh century when laity and clergy were most critical of the corrupt and decadent life led in many monasteries throughout Europe, one should find among reformers the most exaggerated claims for the benefits of monastic life. Peter Damian (1007–1072), one of the most ardent and indefatigable monastic reformers, provides ample evidence of this paradox.

From their origins in the twelfth century to their support for and involvement in the Reformation in the sixteenth, the Waldensian heretics professed nonviolence as one of their beliefs. Later Protestant and Catholic polemicists equated the profession of nonviolence with a policy and bestowed upon the sect a reputation as one of the precursors of religious pacifism. More recent scholars have noted that the heretics at least occasionally employed violence. I will argue that lay Waldensian believers, called credentes, reacted violently to persecution and learned to employ aggression in pursuit of political goals. In the later Middle Ages, at least, Waldensians resorted to violence on enough occasions and in enough different locations to justify dropping the idea that they were a nonviolent group. Their use of violence did become more sophisticated—that is, more closely connected to political goals—during the fifteenth century as access to representatives of the state increased.

No woman played the main role in the sixteenth-century Reformation in any country. But in Norway's Reformation Lady Inger of Austraat and two of her sons-in-law, Vincens Lunge and Nils Lykke, stand out as central and dramatic figures. Yet since Norway is a land that was then a backwater eddy in history, this Reformation tends to be overlooked. Thus historians have not recognized Lady Inger's important role.

Historians of English Puritanism concede that by the 1650s the revolution of the saints had run its course. The political activism of the Presbyterians, Independents, and radical sects during the war gave way in the Interregnum period to more private concerns of personal and collective piety. The pattern of changing popular mood in an unstable political environment is clear enough, but the social meanings of religion as devotional practice are more obscure. Lost in the historical analysis is the realization that piety is an expressive form of communication in the politics of social life. In times of militant controversy the public role of piety is more obviously ideological, and devotional literature achieves publicity in the sense of promoting sectarian reformation. From this perspective, I shall focus on Henry Jessey's The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (London, 1647) and will place it in the context of the art of dying (ars moriendi) tradition and of factional pluralism in civil war London. The story of Sarah Wight's illness and conversion experience attempted to unify religious and political divisions in a crucial revolutionary year. Within a traditional framework of devotional literature, Jessey communicated a political message. Sarah Wight herself was not a passive recipient of ministerial advice, but an influential teacher of radical theology. In fact, it was the customary form of the artes moriendi tradition that allowed her conversion to become an occasion for lay preaching.

Daniel Neal's The History of the Puritans was a standard eighteenth-century source for modern historians and, as will be shown, prefigured nineteenth-century Whig conceptions of Puritanism. Published in four volumes between 1732 and 1738, Neal's work went through at least twenty-one editions or reprints; the last one was done in 1863. New editions were printed in London, Bath, Dublin, New York, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the History was twice expanded by continuators in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The History of the Puritans was not a narrowly religious or sectarian study: Neal strove to elucidate the Puritan contribution to the state. A Congregationalist minister, Neal produced the closest thing we have to an official Dissenting history of England, one which glorified the role of Puritanism in fostering English liberty. To study Neal's History is to gain insight into the historical and political ideology of early eighteenth-century Dissent.

In early January of 1749 John Wesley canceled a previously scheduled trip to Rotterdam in order to write a seventy-nine-page open letter to the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton on the subject of miracles in the early, post-apostolic church. The letter is one of Wesley's longest original writings, but it has never been studied critically. In it, Wesley's relationship to intellectual currents of his age become particularly clear, both because of the subject with which it is concerned (God's intervention in history) and because of the interlocutor to whom it is addressed (Conyers Middleton of Cambridge University).

In recent years historians have begun exploring the feminization of religion in nineteenth-century America. While much of the published debate has centered on the particular definition presented by Ann Douglas in her study, The Feminization of American Culture, other scholars have adopted the term but applied it in different ways. Douglas based her argument on a small sample of liberal Protestant female writers and clergymen in New England whom she saw as giving cultural expression to a new popular theology. She did not explore its impact upon any particular congregation, and much of the controversy surrounding her thesis has focused on the narrow base upon which she made expansive claims. The concept of a feminized church, however, has attracted a number of scholars. Some, like Gerald Moran, have found evidence of the process much earlier in New England, while Mary Ryan and others have explored church membership during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. The research continues the Northeastern focus, however, in terms of both geography and denomination. Thus historians still have no sense as to the universality of these trends. In addition, the focus has remained on church membership and cultural perceptions of women's religious role. We have precious little information on how women translated ideas about their role into the life of an ongoing religious institution.

On the west front of Bath Abbey there are carved two stone ladders stretching from heaven to earth on which twelve angels are climbing, six on each ladder. A tourist who sees the west front of the abbey for the first time is told that the carvings represent the dream of Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells under Henry VII and his former chief secretary. The bishop had a nocturnal vision of angels climbing ladders to heaven. As he stood before the ladders in amazement, he heard voices saying that an olive should establish the crown and that the king should restore the church. He took the reference to olives and kings to be an allusion to his own name and concluded that he, Oliver King, should support the Tudor monarchy and rebuild the ruined abbey at Bath.

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 resulted in the immediate exile of all ministers of the French Reformed churches not amenable to conversion, the illegal flight of several hundred thousand of their fellow-believers to neighboring Protestant lands, and the nominal conversion under duress of the rest of the Roman Catholic church. It also precipitated a literary polemic in which Protestant writers protested vigorously the injustice of revoking an “irrevocable” edict—and the cruel and oppressive measures preceding and accompanying it. Catholic counterparts asserted that, on the contrary, the Edict had been a temporary expedient to end civil strife, extorted forcibly by a naturally rebellious and turbulent minority.

During the past two decades scholars have become more appreciatively aware of the medieval scholastic roots of Protestantism and have begun to gain some appreciation, albeit halting, of the scholastic form of Protestantism which dominated the Protestant universities in the seventeenth century. This awareness implies, in the first place, a development beyond the thesis advanced by Lortz and Bouyer that Protestantism was the effect of the decadent nominalist theology of the later Middle Ages. Scholars like Oberman, Hägglund, and Steinmetz have acknowledged much of the continuity but have emphasized the positive character of late medieval thought.

In his comparative analysis of various millennial movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge constructs a formula for cultural change, which he defines as “old rules” to “no rules” to “new rules.” The first phase of these movements invariably involves a period of social unrest. Society deviates from the old rules as old formulas fail and institutions malfunction. People flout the political, religious, and social establishments with seemingly unpatriotic, blasphemous, and antisocial acts. In the next phase, society hangs between the old order and the new in an interim period in which neither the old standards nor the new hold sway. At that point, millennial movements often materialize in search of a new society. Burridge defines them as new cultures or social orders coming into being. Rather than “oddities” or “diseases in the body social,” they involve “the adoption of new assumptions, a new redemptive process, a new political-economic framework, a new mode of measuring the man, a new integrity, a new community: in short, a new man.” In the third and final phase, the new rules solidify as the new culture takes shape, which in time may represent the old rules and old order for a future prophetic movement. Millenarians cannot last as millenanans. They endure only as they scuttle or transform their millenarian outlook.

Writing in the first issue of The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide in 1846, an unnamed editor hailed the virtues of the cold-water cure: “Instead of the dosing and drugging of the old system of practice, it proposes to rely on the indwelling healing power of nature alone, to provoke and regulate which, it employs the widespread element of fresh unadulterated water.” In case readers had not caught the full dimensions of the message, the writer inserted “the testimony of an experienced physician of Massilon, Ohio.” The doctor, an A. Underhill, waxed eloquent on his investigations of “the Water Treatment of disease” and worked his way to a concluding rhetorical flourish. “Physiology, Phrenology, and Magnetism,” he summarized, “are the keys that are unlocking the great mysteries of nature and mind, and letting us in, as it were, to the inner temple, where the sunbeams of light and truth are filling the minds and understandings of all the truly devout worshippers of the Eternal principles which govern all things.”

On a December evening in 1869, with memories of civil war still fresh in their minds, a large audience gathered in the great hall of Cooper Union in New York City to hear about another conflict, still taking its toll—“with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon.” Although waged with pens rather than swords, and for minds rather than empires, this war, too had destroyed lives and reputations. The combatants? Science and Religion.

Wauwatosa is a suburb of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was there that a particularly fascinating bit of twentieth-century church history was played out between 1900 and 1929. Three theological professors, J.P. Koehler, August Pieper, and John Schaller, headquartered in Wauwatosa sought to influence a generation of students preparing for the ministerium of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran church. Short-lived and generally scorned, the Wauwatosa Theology is clothed in a comic-tragic story. Its rise and fall is contemporaneous with the rise and fall of its chief framer, John Philip Koehler.

Many scholars have observed that during the first half of the nineteenth century American philosophy, science, and education were dominated by Scottish Realism, or the philosophy of “Common Sense.” Its first significant influence has been traced to John Witherspoon, an Edinburgh-trained minister who became president of the College of New Jersey in 1769. Thereafter, especially after 1800, Realist texts were introduced gradually into American colleges, and by the I 820s generally had replaced the older texts. Through use in numerous American colleges, the works of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, George Campbell, James Beattie, William Hamilton, and others exercised a pervasive influence.