Modern church historians have roundly accepted the ancient pedigree of imperial regalia privileges exercised by the archbishops of Cyprus, yet new research has shown that their origins are actually to be found in the mid-sixteenth century and within a decidedly western intellectual and ecclesial orbit. This article builds on such findings by documenting the modern history of these privileges and their relationship to the emerging political role of the archbishops of Cyprus as ethnarchs as well as archbishops of the Cypriot community under both Ottoman and British empires. Travelling across the boundaries of western and non-western cultures and employing a rich interdisciplinary array of evidence (chronicles, liturgy and liturgical vestments, hagiography, iconography, insignia, painting, cartography, diplomacy, and travel literature), this article presents a coherent reconstruction of the imperial regalia tradition's modern historical evolution and its profound impact on modern Cypriot church history. This study integrates the often compartmentalized English, French, Italian, German, and Greek scholarship of many subfields, producing a new holistic understanding of how the archbishop's ethnarchic aspirations could produce a spiritual culture in which St. Barnabas, the island's founding patron saint and once famous apostolic reconciler, became transformed into an ethnarchic national patriot and defender against foreign conquerors.

Two of the most famous Catholic histories written during the early modern period were the Annales ecclesiastici of Caesar Baronius (d. 1607), a year-by-year chronicle of the Catholic Church from the birth of Christ to the twelfth century, and the Istoria del concilio tridentino of Paolo Sarpi (d. 1623), a scathing critique of the Council of Trent that argued the famous council had only made religious problems worse. Rather than comparing either of these works with similar histories written by protestants—thereby investigating inter-confessional Reformation debates—this article sets Baronius's Annales and Sarpi's Istoria side by side to explore disputes within Catholicism itself. By analyzing how the authors examine four topics in their histories (Peter and the papal primacy, the relationship between the local and universal church, the history of ecumenical councils, and the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities), as well as considering both historians' actions during the Venetian interdict crisis of 1606, this essay argues that Sarpi and Baronius fundamentally disagreed about the origins and exercise of both secular and ecclesiastical authority. These two modes of Catholic history-writing reveal how Sarpi and Baronius drew from contemporary political models, such that “ecclesiastical history” could have significant political ramifications.

In the mid-1600s, the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya reported that man-eating jaguars were helping to convert Guaraní Indians to Catholicism. This article tests his claim by aggregating multiple mentions of jaguars found in the accounts and letters of Jesuit missionaries in the reductions of Paraguay and the Moxos from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the writing of Jesuits Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, François-Xavier Eder, Alonso Messia, and Martín Dobrizhoffer. Cumulatively, their predator sightings and references suggest that, indeed, the actions of real jaguars were transforming local religious beliefs. The presence of jaguars in Jesuit records also reveals the complexity of missionary and indigenous attitudes towards animals. Jesuits often associated jaguars with pre-Christian jaguar-shaman rituals, but also considered them to be divine instruments. Indigenous peoples sometimes preserved older practices, but also occasionally took real jaguars as an impetus to convert to Christianity. Both Jesuits and indigenous peoples reacted to jaguar incursions with violence as well as spiritual reflection. Most importantly, the prominence of active jaguars on this contested religious frontier suggests that animals should be viewed as more than symbols in Christian history. Jesuit records indicate that jaguars were key third players in zones where Europeans and indigenous populations met.

By the mid-seventeenth century, radical protestant tolerationists in Britain and the British Atlantic began to conceive of religious liberty as a civil liberty applicable to all subjects, in contrast to contemporary puritans who limited toleration to orthodox protestants. This essay seeks to explain why certain puritans, however small in number, came to adopt radical views on toleration in contrast to the religious mainstream in the Anglophone world. Drawing upon a longer history of ecclesiastical independence than considered in the existing scholarship on religious toleration, it identifies a hitherto unexplored relationship between ecclesiastical independence in England and the Atlantic World.

During World War I, American political, military, and religious leaders sought to foster the view that protestants, Catholics, and Jews were equal stakeholders in society. Crucial in shaping the embrace of this “tri-faith” ideal were leading members of all three traditions, who used their connections to the federal government to ensure that many facets of national life reflected this new conception of the nation's religious character. The military chaplaincy put these ideals into practice, and interfaith activity became commonplace in the army. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chaplains worked closely together, and provided pastoral care or offered religious rites to wounded and dying soldiers from different faith traditions. This article examines how the wartime break from political and social normality, the desire to project a particular image of the nation abroad, and Americans' firsthand encounter with religion in Europe all contributed to idealizations of the inclusive nature of American civil religion during World War I. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the transitional nature of wartime culture and the strong role of the federal government in fostering these values prevented this outlook from firmly taking root. The experience did, however, provide a critical precedent for subsequent idealizations of a protestant-Catholic-Jewish nation.