The controversy over Origenism that erupted in the last years of the fourth century and the opening years of the fifth has puzzled many students of the period: no single identifiable theological issue seemed at stake. At the center of the Arian controversy lay a debate over the subordination (or nonsubordination) of the Son to the Father; in the fifth-century christological disputes Jesus' “nature” or “natures” prompted disagreement. But what was the focus of the Origenist controversy: the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father? the “fall” of the rational creatures into bodies? the restoration of the Devil? the interpretation of resurrection from the dead?

Few issues have received as much attention and achieved as little consensus among historians of late medieval theology during the past several generations as the debate over the character of “nominalism.” One thrust of the research from this debate has focused on the theological dimensions of this scholastic tradition: building on the work of Erich Hochstetter, Paul Vignaux, and others, Heiko Oberman discussed this development in the North American arena of scholarship by describing theological concerns as “the inner core of nominalism.”1

Ever since Jacob Burckhardt dismissed him as “the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity,” Eusebius has been an inviting target for students of the Constantinian era. At one time or another they have characterized him as a political propagandist, a good courtier, the shrewd and worldly adviser of the Emperor Constantine, the great publicist of the first Christian emperor, the first in a long succession of ecclesiastical politicians, the herald of Byzantinism, a political theologian, a political metaphysician, and a caesaropapist. It is obvious that these are not, in the main, neutral descriptions. Much traditional scholarship, sometimes with barely suppressed disdain, has regarded Eusebius as one who risked his orthodoxy and perhaps his character because of his zeal for the Constantinian establishment.

Clustered around the episcopal center of Clermont, in that least accessible French province of Auvergne, a series of romanesque churches built between the end of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries harbor sculptured capitals which repeatedly treat the themes of avarice and usury. Although the virtues and vices provided a popular and graphic subject for sculptors throughout France during this period, only in Auvergne do we discover such a specific emphasis on the sins of avarice and usury. In some cases the subject is treated to the exclusion of all others, and every example has been placed in a predominant and highly visible location within the church.

In late 1433, after two years of intrigue and negotiations, Pope Eugenius IV agreed to acknowledge the legitimate existence of the Council of Basel. The recently crowned Emperor Sigismund had gone to Basel, and numberous clerics, including many cardinals, had abandoned the curia for the council. An obstreperous duke of Milan threatened the papal states “in the name of the holy synod,” and in May 1434 the populace of Rome rebelled, foreing the pope to flee down the Tiber.

Anne Hutchinson has been one of the few women to attain canonical status in the history of colonial New England. Her marvelous intellectual abilities (so unusual in a seventeenth-century woman), her popularity among Boston men as well as women, and the powerful political and theological implications of her challenge render Hutchinson a force that must be explored if colonial Massachusetts is to be understood. Not only are historians fascinated by this extraordinary woman herself, they are intrigued by the colony's response to her; for in that very response the founders may have revealed their essential character. So a few books and many articles have analyzed and reanalyzed Hutchinson as victim of Puritan injustice, as threat to the Puritan experiment, as menopausal neurotic, as antinomian heretic, as rebel (occasionally a protofeminist one).

The fourteenth-century scholastic was obsessed with the problem of truth. One manifestation of this interest was the development of the highly abstract disciplines of formal logic and epistemology, by the study of which, philosophers and theologians believed, it would be possible to arrive at the truth with greater confidence. But the successors of Ockham and Holcot were interested in more than mere abstractions: they wished to establish a means by which the truth, once discovered, could be validated and its accuracy guaranteed to laity. When the truth in question was a point of Christian doctrine, this concern took on a special urgency. Confronted by an alarming array of both academic and popular heresies, the church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could no longer be satisfied simply to assert the infallibility of Christian truth sub specie aeternitatis; it was ever more necessary to make determinations of Christian truth and falsehood in this life. There resulted occasionally heated and always interesting debates over the nature and distribution of doctrinal authority.

Michael Heyd's description of the period between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as one of transition between orthodoxy and enlightenment has particular application to the theological climate of Geneva, the birthplace of Reformed theology. François LaPlanche refers to this era in Geneva as one of “enlightened or liberal orthodoxy.” He defines such enlightened orthodoxy as a return to the biblical text unencumbered by the controversial language of Reformed scholasticism, with the primary goal of creating a practical form of theology that the average parishioner could understand. One of the most representative theologians of this period and one who was to a great extent responsible for educating an entire generation of “enlightened orthodox” theologians was Louis Tronchin (1629–1705).

The westward movement carried Americans to the banks of the Mississippi River by 1840, and in the following decade hardy pioneers began crossing the plains and mountains to settle on the Pacific coast. Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill near present-day Sacramento on 24 January 1848, and the ensuing gold rush created a spectacle such as the world had never seen before.

Melchior Hoffman, the Swabian furrier turned Reformation lay preacher, played a minor role in the early stages of the Danish Reformation, as preacher, polemicist, and printer. This paper will address some of the remaining problems in the narrative of Hoffman's Danish tenure and reassess some of the longstanding interpretations.

The myth of the American West has become the nation's greatest cultural creation. From nineteenth-century German writer Karl May to the present day Solidarity movement in Poland, images drawn from the frontier West have inspired people throughout the globe. Although scholars have spent years trying to separate fact from fiction in this tale, most have concluded that it is impossible. “The myth,” historian Robert Athearn has noted, “is an essential part of the western past.”1

Since 1984, the year of his death, a veritable cottage industry of criticism has appeared to decipher, decode, and demolish Michel Foucault. Despite the polemics, ambiguities, and, at times, the impenetrability of his prose, Foucault and his critics do agree that one of the central concerns of his work, particularly his early work, was an analysis of power and how such institutions as police, prisons, and churches reflect the power structures of society.

As I began researching religion and woman suffrage in the South I asked a prominent historian of southern religion if he knew of any sources. I had assumed that religion and woman suffrage had an intimate relationship in the South, since historians have amply documented the close connection between southern religion and culture. After scraching his head for a moment, however, he commented dryly, “There really aren't any sources. That will be a short paper.” He went on to explain that religious arguments were seldom used in the struggle for woman suffrage, that natural rights ideology and the social benefits of moral women voting were more common defenses than ones based on Scripture. Even antisuffragists relied on the threat of black women voting and the superfluity of women voting when they were represented by their husbands at the ballot box more often than explicitly religious arguments.

Many twentieth-century historians of early modern England have assumed that ecclesiastical jurisdication was a lost cause after the Restoration, and thus, in contrast to earlier periods, there has been little research on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. However, an examination of the Correction Court records for the Diocese of Carlisle between 1704 and 1758 and a summary survey of other dioceses suggest that such archives may prove useful for historians. This article uses the Carlisle Correction Court archive to study the charges which were brought to the court in the first half of the eighteenth century and, after a brief description of the social and economic setting, looks at the characteristics of the people brought to book.

In the years since the civil rights and black power movements cooperative black religious organizations have become a familiar feature of the religious landscape in America. Among these interdenominational bodies, in addition to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, may be noted the now defunct National Conference of Black Churchmen, the Black Theology Project, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Congress of National Black Churches. Little noted, however, is a precursor of these organizations which functioned for two decades prior to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, which originated in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, has gone through many changes. After the exuberant, expansive early years, most Friends entered a period of quietism, in which they waited patiently for divine direction and largely withdrew from the society around them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of Friends on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the evangelical movement which had taken hold in both the Anglican church and the newer Methodist denomination. While some Quakers were caught up in such ultra-evangelical activities as revivals and the holiness movement, others turned away and accepted the new liberalism which appeared in Protestantism.

Writing in the midst of World War II, the Italian exiles Gaetano Salvemini and Giorgio La Piana charged that the Catholic church in America had bestowed its blessing upon Benito Mussolini and fascism.1 In discussing this charge the historian John Diggins admitted that “at first glance it does appear that the American clergy had indeed composed a political choir in behalf of Fascism.”2 Diggins portrayed a large number of Catholic clergy led by figures like Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and Father Charles E. Coughlin who found occasion to praise Mussolini. He outlined the views of the major Catholic periodicals and discovered that only the Paulist-sponsored Catholic World took exception to fascism with any consistency.3 Nonetheless, Diggins partially dismissed the charge of Salvemini and La Piana. He argued that the Catholic church in the United States during the interwar years was not a pro-Fascist monolith and briefly touched on the anti-Fascist endeavors of such individuals as Monsignor Joseph Giarrochi, Father Francis Duffy, and Father James Gillis, C.S.P., the erstwhile editor of the Catholic World. Notably, Diggins accorded particular status among Catholic anti-Fascists to Monsignor John A. Ryan, whom he described as having waged “a relentless assault upon Mussolini's dictatorship and upon the Catholic defense of Fascism” and as being “the theological thorn in the flesh of complacent Catholic apologists for Fascism.”4

The 1988 Centennial of the American Society of Church History should make us pause long enough to try to see Philip Schaff(1819–1893) whole and to appraise (if I may borrow a phrase) “the transient and permanent” in his life's work. Complementing George H. Shriver's centennial biography, Philip Schaff: Christian Scholarand Ecumenical Prophet (1987), in this essay I propose to sketch an intellectual portrayal of Schaff. My aim is to highlight and appraise briefly what is theologically significant in his total career as well as to place his life in the larger context of the history of theology and of the churches on both sides of the Atlantic.

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that all conservatism is based on the idea that if things are left alone, they will stay unchanged. Challenging this notion, he observed that a white post left alone soon becomes a black post; to maintain a white post one must always be painting it again—and, hence, always be having a revolution. Within evangelical Protestantism in late Victorian Canada a “revolution” of sorts took place in evangelical Protestantism's approach to conversion, the nature and consequences of which have been overlooked because the language of the parties involved has on the surface appeared to differ little from the revivalism which preceded it.

The idea for this massive work (3 vols. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988], xv + 492, 414, and 692 pp.) originated in a course on Renaissance humanism at Barnard College and Columbia University in the spring semester of 1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and taught by the editor of the work, Professor Albert Rabil, Jr., with Professor Maristella Lorch. They agreed that recent scholarship concerned with Renaissance humanism made a new “synthesis” desirable, but that the sheer quantity of this new work put such a project beyond the competence of any individual scholar. The three volumes under review consist, therefore, of forty-one essays, mostly written specifically for them, by almost the same number of specialists. These essays were then organized into three volumes entitled, respectively, Humanism in Italy, humanism beyond Italy, and Humanism and the Disciplines.