Hildegard, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess of Bingen, is best understood not as a mystic, but as a visionary prophetess. The spectacular visions that introduce the sections of her three great works, the Scivias, the Liber Vitae Meritorum, and the Liber Divinorum Operum have dazzled modern readers, but they are not the only or even the most important expressions of her prophetic inspiration. Her prophetic insight also allowed her to understand the figures of the Scriptures and relate them to contemporary theological and political questions. Nor can her visions, however central they are to her symbolic theology, be separated from her interpretations of them, her understanding of scriptural typology, or her role as a reforming prophetess.

The recent interest in reconstructing the history of spirituality and religious belief is nowhere more welcome than in the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States. From the very point of its emergence as a recognizable subdiscipline at the turn of the century and lasting into very recent scholarship, American Catholic history has been a relentlessly “topdown”affair. It focused on the leaders of the church—almost all of them white males—and on official church institutions. Episcopal biography was the preferred form and, as often as not, “progress” was the theme: the hierarchy established itself steadily along the advancing frontier; populations of clergy, religious, and laity all increased heroically; immigrants once despised were transformed into the American mainstream. There was even an inspirational final chapter to the tale, as one American Catholic finally grasped the brass ring of acceptance and moved into the White House. The story was a deliberately edifying one, but it was a story primarily for insiders. Perhaps for that reason alone, American Catholic history seemed to remain, as Leslie Tender has recently observed, “on the margins” of serious scholarly discourse.

Traditional nineteenth-century views of the relationship between science and Christianity have seen the two in a mortal conflict from which science emerged victorious over an obscurantist theology which sought to dominate the thinking of the new scientific class. Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) represented a high point in such battlefield historiography. Recent writers have found the relationship to be more complex and less militaristic as a result of examining more closely the context in which the alleged battles took place. This paper will examine the case of English evangelist John Wesley (1703–1791), long a scapegoat of the warfare model. Wesley was often tarred with antiintellectualism during his lifetime and, in the ensuing two centuries, this argument has focused on his attitudes toward natural science. The effect has been to cast a leading religious figure of eighteenth-century England in the antiscience mold.

Throughout the nation's history, Americans have used foreign events as a screen upon which to project their own domestic hopes and fears. European revolutions in particular have become the occasion for airing homespun anxieties about social (and religious) upheaval. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Red Scare of 1920 are simply the most prominent examples of how revolutions abroad can stir the fears of American conservatives. According to some historians, the American reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871 was just as swift and negative as the reaction to the French and Russian Revolutions. An examination of clerical response to the Commune, however, suggests a very different picture: that of a community of public spokesmen trying to make sense of a foreign upheaval for their American audience while offering hope that similar events were avoidable on this side of the Atlantic.

In September 1908 the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, offended Roman Catholics by cancelling the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which was to have been the climax of the 1908 international Eucharistic Congress. This incident illustrates the persistence of religious extremism as a disruptive force in British politics and the muddled manner in which Asquith's government dealt with crises. As early as 1900 social and economic issues had become the dominant focus of British politics, and Great Britain had established a reputation for religious toleration. In spite of the growing trend toward secularism, militant Protestants continued to agitate against Catholicism by resurrecting archaic laws restricting Catholic rituals.