An intriguing phenomenon of late antique Palestine is the abundance of rural churches located outside village boundaries yet obviously in close contact with them, having been constructed by wealthy local patrons. What led to the establishment of such churches and how did they differ from similar building initiatives within the village boundaries? In answering these questions, this article takes a sociological stance, using Pierre Bourdieu's ‘theory of fields’ (‘champs’) to suggest that such construction was the product of symbolic and economic competition in the ‘field of religious goods’ between the rural ‘lay’ elite and the provincial ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The article explores the theories of Roland of Cremona op (†1259), the first Dominican master of theology in Paris and a practising physician, regarding demonic influence on body and soul. Roland uses contemporary neurological theories of voluntary motion and cognition to explain how precisely demons might move the bodily members of possessed subjects, induce seductive images and implant scientific knowledge. The complex interaction of fields of knowledge demonstrated in his unique theories sheds light on the intellectual climate of the early thirteenth century in general, and of the early Parisian Dominican school in particular.

Amid the great Protestant martyrologies of the mid-sixteenth century, Heinrich Pantaleon's Martyrvm historia (1563) has been comparatively overlooked. This article argues that Pantaleon's martyrology acted as a capstone to the narrative framework of Protestant suffering and resistance. Pantaleon's command of vernacular languages gave him access to a wider range of material than other martyrologists, material which his Latin text made accessible to learned readers across Europe. This article also examines the collaboration between Pantaleon and John Foxe, which directly inspired Pantaleon's martyrology and enabled Foxe to give a cohesive, trans-European account of Protestant martyrs in his Acts and monuments.

In seventeenth-century France, secular law favoured parents’ authority in children's choices of marriage, religion or the clerical state, despite Catholic theology and canon law favouring individual freedom. Negotiating this tension led many clerical writers – in advice on choosing a state of life found in devotional treatises, sermons and catechisms – to reconcile parental involvement with vocational liberty. Believing that the right choice of a state was virtually necessary for salvation, they urged parents and children to cooperate in discerning and accepting God's call. Amid conflicts with French law and culture, pastoral persuasion helped to forge an enduringly influential strain in modern Catholicism.

The Holy See's involvement in interwar multilateralism is rarely acknowledged, largely due to its exclusion from the Versailles settlement and resulting institutions. Using new archival findings, this article reevaluates the Vatican's role in the contestation and construction of this new order, focusing on the League's International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Unofficially acting as Vatican intermediaries, a number of League officials quietly promoted Catholic visions of internationalism from within this body. The activities of these individuals provided an alternative method for promoting the Holy See's interests within the emergent international order, in conscious competition with more dominant secular conceptions of internationalism.

Scholarship in recent decades has steadily chipped away at the image of Martin Luther as a figure of singular historical significance. Some have sought to embed Luther firmly in his late medieval context, and to situate him within a circle of reformers. Others have pluralised the Reformation, describing a diversity of ideas and movements not bound to Luther's teaching – an array of ‘visions of reform’ shaped by social location and gender. Social and cultural history have enriched a field long dominated by historians of theology and politics. Finally, efforts to rethink periodisation have unseated Luther and the Reformation from the turning point of history. Luther and his fellow reformers thus can find themselves at the end of an ‘age of reform’ that began centuries before, or in the middle of longer and more fundamental processes of social, political and religious transition.