Over the past several decades Leonine studies have focused attention on Pope Leo the Great's Christology, noting the influence his Tomus ad Flavianum had at the Council of Chalcedon. In fact, because of this strong influence twentieth-century scholars have studied the Tome nearly exclusively in order to identify the heart of Leo's Christology. There can be no question, of course, that the Tome should be consulted in order to understand Leo's Christology, but it marks only one phase in the ongoing development of the ways he chose to express his christological insights. In part the Tome itself precipitated this development insofar as it opened up his Christology to scrutiny in the East. The tone of Leo's insights and the language he used to express them shifted and acquired greater precision over time in his letters and sermons in direct response to the dynamics of the christological controversy in the East, of which Leo's Tome made him a part. This development is most evident in three areas: his avoidance of the “Mother of God” title for the Virgin Mary after initially using it early in his pontificate; his use of the terms homo and humanus, which Leo learned to distinguish later in his pontificate; and his adoption of the Antiochene homo assumptus formula late in his pontificate to emphasize the fullness of Christ's human nature. These phenomena reflect the pope's careful attempt to distance himself from the rising tide of the Monophysite movement in the East, as he began to channel his traditional, Western Christology more through formulae used by Antiochene theologians. These phenomena can only be observed through careful, chronological analysis of the broader corpus of Pope Leo's works.

The period from the fourth through the seventh century witnessed the elaboration of Christian cults of saints with a particular interest in the ascetic labors and miraculous powers of holy men and women. Although much evidence for these cults derives from literary saints' lives, a genre that emerged simultaneously with the cults, scholars have overlooked the role of the hagiographer as devotee. Previous studies have tended to view an author's piety as a barrier to historical inquiry, dismissing miracle accounts (among other hagiographical elements) as pious fictions. Neglect of the religious dimensions of the activity of writing arises in part from the confluence of two trends. First, renewed interest in late antique popular culture highlights the affinities between the religious life of elites and nonelites. Despite the refreshing aspects of this approach, the distinctly literary contributions to the formation of piety have been overlooked. Second, traditional divisions between patristics and social history continue to exclude theology and religious composition from discussions of piety on the assumption that thought and action are separable. Thanks to the work of Catherine Bell and others, students of religion can appreciate that thinking is an activity, something obvious to Christians in late antiquity such as Gregory of Nyssa, for whom contemplation of God was virtuous motion.

From as early as 200 C.E., the church made the spring paschal celebration its primary occasion for baptizing new converts. A week of intense preparation climaxed for the candidates in their reception of baptism early on Easter Sunday. During the fourth century, the preliminary preparation of candidates during Lent included attendance at lectures that gave doctrinal instruction. The catechumens who were ready to receive baptism at the coming Pasch turned in their names to be enrolled for the period of teaching. This registration for the final period of catechetical instruction occurred near the beginning of the year, not long after the feast of Epiphany on 6 January—celebrated in the Eastern church since the fourth century as the feast of the baptism of Christ. The proximity of these two events—a celebration of Christ's baptism and the enrolling of candidates for baptism at the next Pasch—made the time around Epiphany a propitious time for preaching sermons on baptism. Since many catechumens in the fourth century delayed their baptism until old age, many of these sermons took the form of exhortations to baptism in order to encourage the hearers not to postpone baptism but to enroll for the immediate season.

In October 1555 Jean Jourdain, twenty-six, a humble farmer living near Geneva, was distraught at having contracted venereal disease, for which he could not afford medical treatment. On a Sunday morning, rather than going to church, Jourdain went into the woods where he stabbed himself. Immediately after inflicting the wound, Jourdain heard the ringing of the church bell. Feeling remorse, he asked forgiveness from God and walked to a nearby village, where he languished another eight days before expiring. In spite of his contrition, authorities ordered that Jourdain's body be dragged on a hurdle and then impaled and left exposed outside the city as a deterrent to others. In February 1564 Julienne Berard was most upset about being convoked by Geneva's Consistory to account for a dispute she had had with her nephew. According to witnesses, Berard, so frightened by the prospect of facing the questions of Calvin and other Consistory members, took her life by throwing herself in the Rhone River. As a result of this self-inflicted death, Berard's body was also dragged through the streets of Geneva and buried at Champel which, as the site of executions, was a place of ignominy. Over a century later, the notary Jean Bardin hanged himself because he was devastated by the deaths from an explosion of three of his young children and by the subsequent burglary of his house. In spite of the entreaties of his widow on behalf of their surviving minor children, the Small Council passed an extremely harsh sentence in September 1670, enjoining that Bardin's body be dragged on a hurdle before burial and that all his assets be confiscated.

The earliest Latin commentaries on the Apocalypse of John interpret this strange and powerful text as a revelation of the Christian community's drama as it fulfills the conditions leading to its glorious triumph in the final chapter of God's temporal plan. According to early Latin exegetes, one event—the opening of the seven seals, described in Apocalypse 6:1 through 8:1—represents a microcosm of the whole, revealing the entire purpose for the church's historical development. Throughout the first millennium of Christian history, biblical authorities analyzing the account of the seven seals for its underlying message concluded that God causes history to unfold and mature in order to allow the assembly of the elect to separate itself from its false brethren within the church. Processed and purified by history, the elect will exist in a state of readiness for their ascension into eternity.

While the study of early medieval kingship and king-making rites has generated an extensive literature, scholarship on contemporary queenship has concentrated on themes of authority and power in religious and political contexts, and queen-making rites have received only passing mention. Beginning in the late ninth and early tenth centuries it became customary in England and Francia for a queen to be ritually inaugurated to her position. The rite of consecration endowed her with a new persona, entailing the attributes and virtues of queenship. Of course, sources reveal that kings' wives had been considered queens and significant members of royal households from at least the sixth century. The nature of queenship changed gradually over the period. Initially marriage to a king made a queen, and this position appears to have been quite satisfactory until the late eighth century, when Bertrada was consecrated queen in 751 or 754. Regular consecrations of queens, which included unction, began in the mid- to late eighth century.

Fray Diego de Landa's harsh inquisition against the Maya Indians of Yucatán has generated passionate controversy for over four centuries. This essay reexamines documentary sources related to the case in order to better understand both the event and Landa's interpretation of his own actions. The evidence suggests that Landa's reading of and response to the Mayan apostasies were shaped by the millenarian ideas of Spanish Franciscanism. Within this millenarian context, a richer and more consistent account of Landa's character and actions becomes possible.

Scholars agree that European Christians in the thirteenth century were enthusiastically devoted to the Virgin Mary. Even when they debated Mary's immaculate conception or her assumption body and soul into heaven, medieval Christians are not thought to have wavered in their desire to rely on her intercessory powers. While today some argue that Mary's virginal maternity set an impossible ideal for women and that her place below the Trinity sanctioned women's subordinate role within Christianity, medieval women supposedly did not assess Mary negatively. Given these widely held assumptions about thirteenth-century attitudes toward Mary, any uncertainty about honoring Mary warrants investigation. Any thirteenth-century Christian who rarely sought Mary's direct intercession but instead asked Christ to intercede with Mary deserves study. Attention especially ought to be given when questions about devotion to Mary are found in an unexpected place: the writings of a female saint renowned for her orthodoxy.

Recent study of English Nonconformity in the nineteenth century has focused upon issues in the integration of a small culture of Dissent into the larger Anglican-dominated culture, issues such as politics, education, and advancement in the general society. Little attention, by contrast, has been given to theological questions or developments. As a result, the impact of some major shifts in theological thinking within denominational traditions has not been carefully pursued; more seriously, such changes have been frequently characterized as illustrations of theological decline. Greater perspective, however, would be gained by locating instances of theological contention and setting them in the larger framework of cultural and religious change. The following exploration of a theological dispute in one Nonconformist congregation is such an attempt.

English Puritans have only a small reputation for aesthetic contributions to architecture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they worshiped God without making a show of buildings or beautiful ceremonies; consequently, there are few grand Puritan architectural monuments. Nonseparating Puritans, blending into the larger church, put their emphasis on the pure preaching and practice of biblical religion, not on outward appearances. And the Separatists, the strictest of the Puritans, gathered in disguised house-churches. Because of this artistic silence it is easy to downplay the importance of architectural concerns in the early history of Puritanism. Whenever historians mention “Puritan” architecture or “nonconformist” architecture, they are likely to describe it as simple, plain, functional, humble, austere, and practical. While true as far as it goes, this description is not the whole story. An examination of Puritan discussions about architecture in early seventeenth-century Netherlands reveals the interplay of theological and practical factors in creating the “proper” church architecture.

Statuary groups, countless illustrations, and colorful stained glass all preserve for us the most famous medieval image of the charitable soldier-saint, Martin of Tours (336–397). The young Martin is depicted seated on his horse dividing his soldier's cape to share it with Christ disguised as a freezing beggar at the gate of Amiens. After abandoning the Roman army, Martin became a monk, an ascetic “soldier of Christ,” and was chosen by the people of Tours as their bishop. Renowned in his lifetime as a wonderworker, Martin's tomb remained for centuries an important pilgrimage center. The later Carolingian kings carried a fragment of Martin's cape into battle as a victory-giving talisman, and French monarchs invoked the saint as their patron. Because of its royalist associations, Saint Martin's basilica at Tours was almost completely destroyed in the French Revolution, and subsequently houses and new municipal streets encroached on the sacred space.

The years surrounding the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) witnessed a historiographical revolution that transformed the study of medieval Christianity. One might say that both a new Vatican ecclesiology and the new religious history sprang from the same conceptual root. Even as the Council articulated a definition of the Catholic Church as the people of God rather than simply a hierarchical institution, a number of important scholars were rediscovering the religious history of the Christian people. Shifting their focus away from the traditional monastic treatises on the contemplative life, scholars argued that all believers, and not just clerical specialists in the sacred, had a spiritual life that constituted a proper object for historical study. This new understanding of the history of Christian spirituality rapidly proved enormously fecund, opening as it did novel and exciting prospects for the study of popular religion.

Hiram Mattison was fighting mad. Some of the holiness people in the Methodist Episcopal church had pulled a fast one. Early in 1867 the New York Preachers' Meeting had hosted a series of speeches on the question, “What are the best methods for promoting the experience of perfect love?” The discussion had been, in the words of one participant, “lengthy and pungent.” Mattison, a seminary professor and long-time opponent of the holiness movement, had weighed in with his professional theological polemics against the movement's doctrine and methods of promotion. He had expected that all the speeches would be published in a single volume. But the proponents of perfect love surreptitiously had withdrawn their manuscripts from the Methodist book room and had them published and copyrighted on their own. The original plan to publish a two-sided debate had been thus defeated, and the advocates of perfect love had scooped their opposition. What a move for people who professed to have attained Christian perfection, said Mattison. It must have paid well, he added, for three editions had been issued in just a few weeks.

The years from 1890 to 1905 were tumultuous ones for church-state relations in France. The Third Republic (1870–1940) sought a more secular state while remaining ever mindful that the majority of French were at least nominally Roman Catholic. Anticlericalism became the unifying theme of an otherwise factious government, and a formal separation of church and state took place in 1905. The church in France, for its part, dreamed of reviving its former power and influence. Some in the church looked back and saw the restoration of the monarchy as the way to realize the dream; others worked to establish a presence in the modern world of factories and department stores. All were concerned with the decline in the number of communicants and the growth of socialism. Feeling threatened and increasingly forced into a defensive stance, the church determined to hold ground and, periodically, even to go on the offensive.

G.Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963), a leading figure in American Protestantism through the first half of the twentieth century, is currently most often relegated to footnote references or mentioned only in relation to two of his most famous colleagues, Kirby Page and Reinhold Niebuhr. He was, however, one of the most renowned international evangelists of the time who worked closely with John R. Mott and Robert Speer in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM). While a student at Yale, Eddy experienced a dramatic deepening of faith in 1889 at the famous Northfield Student Conference and then, while a student at New York's Union Theological Seminary and later at Princeton Theological Seminary, joined the SVM. Despite his seminary study, Eddy chose to remain a layman all his life. As a YMCA traveling evangelist in India from 1896 to 1911 and in Asia from 1911 to 1931, Eddy embodied many of the attitudes and methods of Protestant global mission for the approximately fifty years of its greatest activity. Primarily engaged in student evangelization, Eddy manifested a deep ambivalence toward the method of mission work. An examination of Eddy's life reveals that in Eddy one finds both the cultural imperialism with which nineteenth-century missionaries are often charged and a sensitivity to other peoples and a commitment to indigenous churches and leadership.While Eddy's ministry spanned over five decades, this essay concentrates on Eddy's labor prior to World War I, for in those years Eddy was most in conflict withhimself.

In June 1808, at the age of fourteen, Eunice Bathrick confessed her sins and joined the Shakers (also known as the Believers), a celibate religious community founded by Ann Lee in the late eighteenth century. Although largely unknown to modern scholars, Bathrick played many roles in the Shaker village of Harvard, Massachusetts, where she lived her entire Shaker life. A prolific visionist, a creative thinker, and a dedicated writer, she became an authoritative figure at Harvard and a symbol of the empowering opportunities for women found within the religious structure, particularly the spirituality, of Shakerism. Her work—in the form of an autobiography, several biographies, visions and spirit messages, oral histories, hymn collections, and a web of correspondence with other Shakers and the outside world—provides a unique opportunity to study both this interrelationship between gender, spirituality, and female empowerment in Shaker communities and Bathrick's own individual spiritual journey as a Shaker sister.

Recent scholarship has exploded the myth that German soldiers had nothing to do with genocidal crimes in World War II. We now know that what Omer Bartov has called the “barbarization of warfare” on the eastern front involved regular military as well as SS units and the Einsatzgruppen. But what about the chaplains, Protestant and Catholic, who accompanied Hitler's forces? Those men, linked into both ecclesiastical and military hierarchies, preached and administered the sacraments. Following established traditions, they also boosted morale, accompanied condemned men to their executions, and supported Germany's war aims.

When in the spring of 1817 the thirty-seven-year-old Scottish minister, Thomas Chalmers, descended upon London, the world's greatest metropolis was transfixed. The four benefit sermons that Chalmers preached between 14 May and 25 May produced electrifying results. “All the world wild about Dr. Chalmers,” wrote William Wilberforce in his diary. At the sermon for the Hibernian Society, which distributed Bibles to the Irish poor, Viscount Castlereagh, moving British spirit at the Congress of Vienna, and the future prime minister George Canning were visibly moved. For his final appearance the throng was so intense that Chalmers, arriving shortly before he was to preach, could neither get into the church nor, at first, convince the crowd that he was the preacher, so far did his nondescript appearance fall short of his grand reputation. When friends inside finally recognized Chalmers, they secured his entrance by having him walk on a plank through an open window up to the pulpit itself.

Robert Greenleaf, in his classic book Servant Leadership, makes the argument that in earlier eras it was possible to make a difference in society as an individual. He writes, “Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions—often large, complex, powerful, impersonal, not always competent, sometimes corrupt [institutions]. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.” He goes on to make the case that “trustees” have a key role in creating and maintaining what he calls “servant institutions.”

As missionaries from New England made initial forays into Zululand and Natal in the 1830s, the Zulu people were in a state of considerable stress. Dingan had come to power in 1828 after participating in the assassination of his brother Shaka, the notorious warrior king whose conquests after 1816 brought people from dozens of clans and chieftanships into a Zulu state. Ecological crises caused by drought and competition for scarce resources contributed to Shaka's ability to exert unprecedented authority, as did the predatory incursions of European traders seeking ivory, skins, and slaves in various parts of southeast Africa. Expanding on a tradition of religious initiation and military ranking known as ambutho, Shaka crated a system of loyalty to the state that built on but also compromised the loyalties to particular clans commanded by lesser chiefs.