The congregation of Savigny deserves recognition as a notable expression of the monastic revival which characterized the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Savigny itself was founded around 1112 in the forests which join Normandy, Maine, and Brittany by Vital of Mortain, a former hermit and itinerant preacher. Within 35 years, the congregation which developed from the monastery included more than 30 houses in France and England. These Savigniacs were praised effusively by contemporaries as models to be followed. In spite of Savigny's acknowledged importance, however, many aspects of its early history remain relatively unstudied. The only comprehensive treatment of the congregation is a largely hagiographical account compiled by Dom Claude Auvry, prior to Savigny from 1698 to 1712, which finally was edited and published in the late nineteenth century. The paucity of research on Savigny is explained partially by the fact that in 1147 the congregation was absorbed into the Cistercian order and thereby lost its distinctive identity. However, the study of early Savigniac history is valuable not only because of its intrinsic importance but also because an accurate assessment of the effects of the union on the order of Cîteaux will be possible only through an understanding of the congregation prior to 1147.

The involvement of English women in the radical Protestant movements of the 1640s and 1650s has attracted the attention of a number of modern historians. The hub of such studies is Keith Thomas's provocative 1958 essay, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” which focuses on the expanded role of women in these groups and on the way in which sectarian views indirectly undermined the patriarchal family. More recently, Dorothy Ludlow has studied female preachers in this period, insisting that they were not fanatics but sober women with a distinctive sense of Christian calling who claimed full membership in the Christian community. The more well-known women, such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Cary, have been the subject of recent studies in their own right. For the period after 1660, Pamela Volkman has examined the contrasting ways in which male and female converts to the sects were depicted, noting that women were more likely to be accused of emotional volatility, immorality, or even insanity than were men. These studies have progressed to the point that we are in no danger of overlooking the role of women in English Nonconformity in the mid-seventeenth century.

Before the political and scholarly rediscovery of ethnicity during the past decade, American observers tended to overlook the lingering homeland influences in the lives of this country's immigrant ethnic groups. Scholars here were the world's experts on the consequences which follow international migration: alienation, acculturation, and assimilation. But like their dean, Oscar Handlin, they stressed not the “roots” but the uprootedness of their subjects. According to this tradition, the migrants, torn suddenly from Old World surroundings, had been able to bring with them only a few flimsy pieces of “cultural baggage,” the equivalent of the fragile-looking wicker hampers and precariously bulging cloth bundles with which the newcomers were photographed at Ellis Island but with which they rarely were seen again.

With the publication of Catholic Revivalism in 1978, Jay P. Dolan transferred the scholarly discussion of nineteenth-century American revivalism to a larger arena. He not only unveiled the Catholic counterpart of a phenomenon hitherto considered exclusively Protestant, but he also demonstrated that potentially fruitful comparisons might be drawn between the Protestant and the Catholic revival experiences. Although twentieth-century evangelism still awaits an inclusive ecumenical treatment along the lines pursued by Dolan, some promising subjects for initial forays into this field have surfaced. This essay focuses upon one minor character in the epic story of American Catholic evangelism, David Goldstein (1870–1958), a convert from Judaism and socialism and a pioneer lay Catholic street lecturer between the world wars.

Education is fundamental to any society. In its broadest sense it includes not merely curriculum and educational theory but all of the pressures that help to shape peoples' minds. Education, both formal and informal, is the vehicle through which society transmits its values, its “dreams”, and its worldview to its youth. Precolonial southern Nigerian societies had created educational systems that promoted their own values and moral standards as the guiding principles for their children. The function of such education, in addition to occupational preparation in agriculture, crafts, and religion, was the inculcation of a sense of communal responsibility. Christian missionaries who came in the nineteenth century brought with them European culture and traditions. These traditions were propagated and concretized in the mission schools which were tolerated by the British colonial government. But the colonial government frequently reexamined its views concerning the objectives of the mission schools. During the nationalist period (1945–1960) the nature of politics, particularly in southeastern Nigeria, led to further reevaluation of the basic role of missions in secular education. Then the military officers came to power in 1966. They shared the perspective that the idea of the elimination of mission schools within the Nigerian educational system again should be given serious consideration.