Nicholas of Gusa’s Concordantia catholica, that “most mature and harmonious” of conciliar treatises whose 550th anniversary we celebrated in 1983-1984, bears a dual dedication: to the Emperor Sigismund and to Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, papal legate and president of the Council of Basel from 1431 to 1438. These two figures represented church and empire and—no less significantly—were potential allies to Cusa’s client, Ulrich of Manderscheid, in the disputed election to the archbishopric of Trier.

Some years ago, wrote the Flemish monk Guibert to his friend Radulfus, strange and incredible rumors reached his ears at the Benedictine monastery of Gembloux. They concerned an old woman, abbess of the Benedictine foundation at Bingen-am-Rhein, who had gained such fame that multitudes flocked to her convent, from curiosity or devotion, to seek her prophecies and prayers. All who returned thence astonished their hearers, but none could give a plausible account of the woman, save only that her soul was “said to be illumined by an invisible splendor known to her alone.” Finally he, Guibert, impatient with rumor and zealous for the truth, resolved to find out for himself. In the year 1175 he wrote to this famed seer, Hildegard, with mingled curiosity and awe. Surely she had received “rare gifts, till now practically unheard of throughout all ages”; in prophecy she excelled Miriam, Deborah, and Judith; but let her recall that great trees are uprooted sooner than reeds, and let her keep herself humble.

In the sixth century Johannes Lydus revealed that the city of Rome had three names. The one related to mystic rites was Eros, while the hieratic one was Flora and the political one was Rome. The events we shall discuss took place at Rome, and under the influence of an Eros of sorts. We shall call the heroine “Flora” for reasons to be set forth later. The whole story is told by the early Christian apologist Justin.

The sixth-century Gallic episcopacy contained within its ranks three distinct groups of men. The first group comprised those who had come to the episcopacy from a monastic background; the tradition of the monk-bishop, nurtured in the fifth century by the monastery of Lérins, was still strong, particularly in southern Gaul. The second group consisted of men who, although celibate, were not monks. The third group was composed of married clerics who at the time of ordination had taken a vow of sexual continence. Since source material for this period is comparatively scanty and many bishops are little more than names to us, we have no means by which to establish the proportion of men in the Gallic episcopacy who fit in this third category.1 The most we can say is that the married bishop was a familiar figure in the Merovingian church.

The phenomenon of reform has appeared in many diverse modes throughout the history of the Christian church. At different times Christians have attempted to improve conditions which were perceived to reveal unwelcome deviations from some ideal models. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the call for reform of the church in western Europe was especially loud, and many ameliorating changes did happen at that time. The forces at work strengthened a variety of trends which were as dissimilar as the growing respect for new theological insights, the increasing power of local leaders, and the expanding importance of the common people. Not only did church prelates guide parishioners into reforms; lay folk also influenced their religious superiors into ameliorations. The reforms in the Christian church of western Europe from about 1450 to 1525 were complex upheavals in which Christians attempted to solve the religious problems of that time.

Most historians of the French Revolution accept the now familiar contention that village curés and vicaires sided with the Third Estate in 1789, presumably out of class solidarity born of common origins and personal contact with the sad lot of ordinary people. Historians also agree that most of these “patriot” curiés (as those who supported reforms and the Third Estate in 1789 called themselves) later deserted the Revolution once it became clear that what the Third had in mind included sweeping restraints on the once vaunted power and property of the church and on the spiritual autonomy and authority of the French clergy.

In 1710 the English biblical commentator Matthew Henry declared that no book was more “serviceable” for the “right ordering” of human behavior than the biblical book of Proverbs. According to him, that scriptural collection of precepts and maxims comprised “a complete body of divine ethics, politics, and economics” which exposed vice and recommended virtue. The book of Proverbs provided “rules” governing “every relation and condition.” Henry noted that Proverbs was written for the use of all persons, but especially for the simple, the ignorant, and the young. Youth is the time of learning, he stated, the age of instruction and impressions.

One of the most pressing needs in the field of medieval biblical studies is for an adequate historical overview of developments in the late Middle Ages. One of the pioneers, the late Beryl Smalley, never fully achieved the intended sequel to her magisterial Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, although her English Friars and Antiquity was an excellent beginning, particularly for the early fourteenth-century English group. Other surveys end with Nicholas of Lyra, skip from the thirteenth century to the Reformation, or give only the most cursory attention to the late medieval period.2 And yet the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were rich in biblical commentaries, and scholars, have long considered a more precise understanding of developments in that period to be essential for an adequate appreciation of the character and significance of biblical commentaries in the early sixteenth century.

Scholars of Pietism, the religious reform movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, have attempted in recent years to increase understanding and respect for the movement among American scholars. F. Ernest Stoeffler's The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (1971), Dale Brown's Understanding Pietism (1978), and Peter Erb's Pietists: Selected Writings (1983) all begin with a plea for open-minded recognition of Pietism's positive contributions. Our negative interpretation of the movement, they note, has been shaped largely by those opponents who first gave the Pietists their label.

When students of early American religion remember David Brainerd, if they remember him at all, it is usually in the context of the First Great Awakening. Born in Haddam, Connecticut in 1718, Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1739, shortly after he had experienced conversion. By his sophomore year, when New Haven was aflame with the religious fervor that spread like a brush fire through New England, Brainerd was recognized as one of the “New Light” student leaders at Yale. For this reason, he was among the first undergraduates to be disciplined by the college administration as part of an effort to contain religious enthusiasm. Rector Thomas Clap expelled Brainerd in 1742 for remarking that tutor Chauncy Whittelsey had no more grace than a chair and for attending a meeting of Separate Congregationalists in defiance of college rules.

A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. … If you wait until the end of mass, you will be further edified. You will see them approach as near as possible to the high altar, before which they bow profoundly, making several genuflections, and frequently remain for a moment almost prostrate to the ground. From here they go to kneel at the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then before that of St. Joseph. Then follows a last and touching station before the body of the dead Christ which the Italians call the pietá; they pray here for a few moments, and respectfully press their lips to the five wounds of the Saviour. At the door of the church they take holy water, sign themselves with it repeatedly, and sprinkle their faces with it; then turning to the tabernacle they make a last genuflection, as if to bid farewell to our Lord, and finally withdraw.

The Subscription Controversy of the 1770s, often called the Clerical Petition Controversy to distinguish it from other subscription controversies, was just one aspect of the prolonged struggle between liberals, or Latitudinarians, and conservatives within the Anglican church, and it soon was connected with the similar struggle within the Dissenting denominations. There are no full-length modern studies of the Subscription Controversy, but books dealing with various aspects of eighteenth-century religious history often mention it.1

The effects of the condemnation of Modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century were deep and far reaching. The Vatican, continuing its long-standing feud with doctrinal Modernism, took sharp, decisive action on 3 July 1907 when the Holy Office issued a syllabus, Lamentabili sane exitu, listing sixty-five condemned propositions taken mostly from the writings of the noted French theologian and exegete Alfred Loisy.1 Two months later, on 8 September, Pius X renewed the attack with his anti-Modernist encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis.2 The encyclical outlined and condemned “most attempts then being made by European Catholics, priests and laity, to incorporate the most recent nonscholastic research and scholarship into the development of theology and scripture studies.”

The years 1820–1850 were characterized by a remarkable transition in American education. A decisive shift occurred in the philosophy and patterns of educating American women which would have marked social, economic, and political ramifications in antebellum America. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, females were seen as weaker intellectually than males; they were denied the right to an equal education with males; and they were educated haphazardly, with few formal opportunities beyond a district school education for any but the rich. Even the “advanced” education at dame schools, boarding schools, and female academies sought only to further domestic skills, social polish, and parlor savvy.

After practicing law in Edinburgh for six years, Thomas Erskine (1788–1870) inherited the estate of Linlathen upon the death of his brother, James. Thereby freed to devote his time to theological reflection and writing, he wrote five books between 1820 and 1837 which stated opinions sharply at odds with the prevailing religious positions of early nineteenth-century British thinkers. In his first book, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, he maintained that the surest sign of Christianity's truth is not to be found in the traditional evidential sources–miracles, fulfilled prophecies, the veracity of the apostles, and so on–but in the intimate relation, or “fittingness,” which inheres between the mode of being recommended in the Bible and the moral, physical, and mental constitution of human beings. This emphasis on the internal and subjective aspects of religious experience characterizes all of Erskine's works and places him, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the forefront of a new way of theologizing in Britain which was to come to fruition in the so-called “Broad Church.” Erskine represents an indigenous British “turn to the subject” antedating the widespread appropriation of continental thought by English and Scottish theologians.

The twenty-fourth of September 1905 started as a typical Sunday in Zion City, Illinois. Promptly at 2:00 P.M. John Alexander Dowie ascended the platform of Shiloh Tabernacle, robed in the brightly embroidered garments of an Old Testament High Priest. He was acknowledged by the seven thousand souls who sat before him as the Messenger of the Covenant, the third and final incarnation of the prophet Elijah, and the General Overseer and First Apostle of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. The 6,600 acres of farms, homes, factories, and businesses surrounding the tabernacle were exclusively his. And for all practical purposes, so were the people. One contemporary journalist judged that Dowie had come to possess the “most autocratic power it is possible to wield in this republic,” while another concluded that “no man… of our time has ever secured anything like the personal following he has.” Near the end of the five hour service the prophet changed into his white expiation robes and, as he had done on countless Sundays in the past, prepared to bless and distribute the Holy Sacraments. But this time, in the semi-darkness of the early evening, he seemed to stagger and slump to the floor. The people soon learned that Dowie had suffered a crippling stroke. They also soon knew that their effort to build a biblical Zion on the “sky-skirted prairie” north of Chicago was in shambles.

It is by no means insignificant that many of the specially funded Tanner Lectures delivered recently at the annual meetings of the Mormon History Association have dealt, to some degree or another, with early Mormon millenarianism. This occurrence is less surprising when it is relized that the lectures come in the wake of a decade that produced what one historian has called “a veritable blizzard of scholarly and popular writings in the often stormy field of millennialism.”

The American Social Gospel and the role of women in American religion recently have emerged as significant concerns for American religious historians, after a period of relative neglect. In 1976 Ronald C. White, Jr. and C. Howard Hopkins called for a fresh, more inclusive look at the Social Gospel, pointing to women as among the “neglected reforms and reformers” in Social Gospel study. Scholarship on women and religion has exploded in the last decade, focusing not only on important individuals and traditional religious images of women, but also on women's own ideas and activities. This article is presented with the hope that it not only may add to the study of the history of women in American religion, but also may contribute to a new understanding of the Social Gospel movement.

The purpose of this paper is to continue and perhaps to further discussion of the basic assumptions that long have undergirded the various general interpretative survey histories of Christianity and religion in America.1 Attention to particular problems, issues, and regions and the struggle with new methods have made available fresh insights into the nature of religious history in the American context. These insights raise the question of whether another general survey history of Christianity or of religion in America can or ought to be written until the profession develops a more adequate interpretive framework built solidly on recent research.