When post-Reformation English authors sought to describe pre-Reformation Catholicism, they turned to the writings of Desiderius Erasmus for historical evidence to back up their arguments justifying the break from Rome. For many later English schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the only Catholic authors they read and the depictions of Catholicism found in the Praise of Folly and, especially, in the Colloquies, became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well as foundational imprints for their mental image of relics, pilgrimages, and other Catholic practices. References to Erasmus as a historical authority for his times appear in dozens, if not hundreds, of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ignoring the literary and fictitious nature of Erasmus's satirical texts, they used Erasmus to justify their depictions of Catholic corruption, superstition, and irrationality. Over time, these descriptions became an almost uncritically accepted portrayal of the Catholic world prior to the rise of Protestantism. This constructed reality thus became the worldview of English speaking Protestants from the mid-sixteenth century up to nearly the present. Examining how later English authors used Erasmus helps us understand the subsequent nature of English historical consciousness and the development of English and Protestant narratives of Church history.

The decades before the Civil War witnessed a series of battles over the meaning and legal status of the American Sabbath. Scholarship has focused on the Sabbatarian movement, a cluster of evangelical churches that sought to institutionalize the Sunday Sabbath. This article takes a new approach by investigating the anti-Sabbatarian movement. In a series of controversies, from Sunday mail in the Jacksonian era to the running of Sunday streetcars on the eve of the Civil War, anti-Sabbatarians rallied against Sabbath laws as an infringement of civil and religious liberty. Though diverse in orientation, anti-Sabbatarians agreed that religion and politics should be kept apart, and that the United States was not, in constitutional terms, a Christian nation. A study of anti-Sabbatarianism is thus of rich significance for the history of Church-State relations in the United States.

Between 1940 and 1945, in the midst of the Holocaust, the citizens of the small town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon rescued several hundred Jewish refugees from certain death. Historians, ethicists, witnesses and participants have pondered the reasons for this altruistic behavior, and have pointed in particular to the faith of the rescuers as the source of their exceptional courage. By examining the theological, economic, and cultural diversity of the region, this article evaluates these claims and challenges in particular traditional narratives of Protestant exceptionalism. This work also seeks to explain why these particular narratives emerged and eventually conflicted with one another. It seems that the rescue on the Plateau resulted from a unique convergence of means, individual and institutional convictions, and cultural habits. In probing the exact role of religious commitment and culture during World War II, a more complex and dynamic picture emerges—and what becomes apparent challenges traditional visions of Huguenots as constant and unequivocal supporters of their Jewish neighbors.

In 1922, George Freeman Bragg, rector of an Episcopal Church in Baltimore, published a volume detailing the work of his fellow church members from the colonial era to the present. He painstakingly recorded baptisms, catechists, church growth, church debates, social outreach, and listed prominent leaders in the movement. His work was, in many respects, unremarkable, one of many garden-variety “church histories” that still line the shelves of seminaries and colleges around the country. Their production reminds us of an era of abundant confidence in the efficacy of religious institutions to shape society, and of histories to mold the future of Christian communities.

At the 1860 conference on Protestant missions held in Liverpool, a session was dedicated to the use of the reported 200,000 monthly missionary periodicals produced by various societies for encouraging the home support of missionary work. The 125 delegates from more than twenty-five Protestant missionary societies both in Britain and abroad had divergent opinions on the prospective contents and audiences for missionary periodicals. One thing that they did agree upon, however, was their necessity. The Reverend Thomas Green from the Church Missionary Society noted that missionary periodicals provided a means of “influencing” the minds of readers in order to excite the missionary spirit among the home community. The high circulation of missionary periodicals was, according to the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Reverend Frederick Trestrail, an indication that they provided a source of information that was received willingly and consumed by the masses.

During the nineteenth century, over 300 missionary periodicals were established in Britain, along with hundreds in North America, Europe, and the colonial world, yet little has been written about the rationale behind their establishment. From their beginnings as sources of intelligence, periodicals developed into vehicles of influence by the first decades of the nineteenth century, with missionary organizations also using this reduplicated commodity to deliberately persuade and mold public attitudes. This article examines some thirty inaugural editorials and first volume prefaces to Protestant missionary periodicals, including those from “new series,” to uncover how editors justified their establishment to their potential readership.

Since the Evangelical Revival triggered a new wave of British millenarian expectations and aroused religiously motivated interest in Jews, various religious bodies and individuals envisioned the necessity of Jews' conversion, stimulating countless and restless efforts to evangelize “God's chosen people.” These efforts, organized within the framework of the vast British missionary enterprise, soon became “nothing short of a national project,” to cite Michael Ragussis. This project, dubbed by its critics as “the English madness,” expressed itself in activity of various societies, and missions, in a wide flow of literature and in constantly recurring public debates. The London Society for Promoting Christianity among Jews (abbreviated from here to the London Society or the Society), was probably its most important outcome. Established as a separate missionary enterprise in 1809, it was the oldest and the largest society in field of nineteenth-century British “Jewish missions.” It sent missionaries not only to the Jewish communities in British colonial spaces, but also far beyond. The efforts of the Society to convert Jews are well reflected in its numerous missionary periodicals whose function, form, and language I wish to discuss here.

Despite extensive engagement, children were invisible in the programs of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary conferences. By the early 1900s this had noticeably changed as denominations and missionary organizations sought to maximize and enhance juvenile missionary interest. Childhood was the key stage in which to establish habits; the future depended upon “the education of the childhood of the race, in missionary matters as in all others.” Literature was pivotal and periodicals were deemed to be the most effective literary form. They provided the young with “impressions which will never be lost . . . nothing will appeal to the young more strongly than stories from beyond the seas, of strange people who know not of Christ, but who need His gospel.” Juvenile missionary periodicals were ubiquitous in Britain, Europe, and America, but they are still only partially understood. Adult and juvenile literature was qualitatively different so that “any adequate analysis . . . requires to be grounded in an understanding of the construction of childhood in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.” This task remains very much a work in progress. Most recent scholarship tends to discursively situate children's periodicals with respect to religion, culture, and politics. All agree on at least a broad two-fold function: the spiritual and the philanthropic. Periodicals per se were an integral part of a large and pervasive Victorian corpus of juvenile religious and moral literature. At the same time missionary periodicals were different. They emphasized child agency by encouraging a “participatory relationship” between readers and their subject. Children became active agents “in a diaologic relationship with [their] world.”

Upon first glance, nineteenth-century German Catholic and Protestant missionary periodicals seem to come from different milieus. Compare two mastheads: an October 1895 issue of the monthly periodical of the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD) and the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society's monthly periodical of November 1895. An ornate woodcut print inhabits the masthead of the SVD periodical, the Kleiner-Herz Jesu-Bote. Jesus, with his sacred heart exposed, stands on clouds and is flanked by two angels, Raphael and Gabriel. In the top left-hand corner, the reader sees the Archangel Michael militantly guarding over the frontispiece with sword and shield, while in the top right-hand corner, the one mortal, St. Francis, smiles benevolently, offering the reader absolution. The periodical's title is presented in lettering akin to an illuminated manuscript. Pictures of saints, relics, and martyrs adorn the rest of the issue.

Missionary periodicals, like their secular counterparts (newspapers and magazines), had the potential to create and sustain media events—those rare and precious times when news coverage breaks out of the confines of its daily routines, allowing contemporaneous themes to surface and occupy center stage. However, mission publications had their specific ways of presenting these issues, which are cast most sharply into relief when the underlying occurrences affected both missions and society at large. It is at those junctures that mission publications became more receptive towards broader political, social, and cultural trends; conversely, society took greater notice of missionary activities than usual during these times.