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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Presidents of our Society have usually delivered annual addresses based on some aspect of their research interests. Few of these customary presentations (13 of 80) have self-consciously grappled with questions of method, definition, or interpretation in the larger context of historiographical concerns. My effort tries to honor both precedents, reporting on my current studies of twentieth-century American church historians while making some normative observations on perennially difficult philosophical problems, particularly those dealing with sacred references in a secular framework. Some of you might think that speaking to historians about historical procedures comes close to violating the injunction in Exodus 23:19 against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. But I suggest that such an exercise is beneficial because all of us can derive greater professional awareness from surveying the options found in scholarly practices past and present.