Some years ago, wrote the Flemish monk Guibert to his friend Radulfus, strange and incredible rumors reached his ears at the Benedictine monastery of Gembloux. They concerned an old woman, abbess of the Benedictine foundation at Bingen-am-Rhein, who had gained such fame that multitudes flocked to her convent, from curiosity or devotion, to seek her prophecies and prayers. All who returned thence astonished their hearers, but none could give a plausible account of the woman, save only that her soul was “said to be illumined by an invisible splendor known to her alone.” Finally he, Guibert, impatient with rumor and zealous for the truth, resolved to find out for himself. In the year 1175 he wrote to this famed seer, Hildegard, with mingled curiosity and awe. Surely she had received “rare gifts, till now practically unheard of throughout all ages”; in prophecy she excelled Miriam, Deborah, and Judith; but let her recall that great trees are uprooted sooner than reeds, and let her keep herself humble.

One of the most pressing needs in the field of medieval biblical studies is for an adequate historical overview of developments in the late Middle Ages. One of the pioneers, the late Beryl Smalley, never fully achieved the intended sequel to her magisterial Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, although her English Friars and Antiquity was an excellent beginning, particularly for the early fourteenth-century English group. Other surveys end with Nicholas of Lyra, skip from the thirteenth century to the Reformation, or give only the most cursory attention to the late medieval period.2 And yet the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were rich in biblical commentaries, and scholars, have long considered a more precise understanding of developments in that period to be essential for an adequate appreciation of the character and significance of biblical commentaries in the early sixteenth century.

When students of early American religion remember David Brainerd, if they remember him at all, it is usually in the context of the First Great Awakening. Born in Haddam, Connecticut in 1718, Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1739, shortly after he had experienced conversion. By his sophomore year, when New Haven was aflame with the religious fervor that spread like a brush fire through New England, Brainerd was recognized as one of the “New Light” student leaders at Yale. For this reason, he was among the first undergraduates to be disciplined by the college administration as part of an effort to contain religious enthusiasm. Rector Thomas Clap expelled Brainerd in 1742 for remarking that tutor Chauncy Whittelsey had no more grace than a chair and for attending a meeting of Separate Congregationalists in defiance of college rules.

After practicing law in Edinburgh for six years, Thomas Erskine (1788–1870) inherited the estate of Linlathen upon the death of his brother, James. Thereby freed to devote his time to theological reflection and writing, he wrote five books between 1820 and 1837 which stated opinions sharply at odds with the prevailing religious positions of early nineteenth-century British thinkers. In his first book, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, he maintained that the surest sign of Christianity's truth is not to be found in the traditional evidential sources–miracles, fulfilled prophecies, the veracity of the apostles, and so on–but in the intimate relation, or “fittingness,” which inheres between the mode of being recommended in the Bible and the moral, physical, and mental constitution of human beings. This emphasis on the internal and subjective aspects of religious experience characterizes all of Erskine's works and places him, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the forefront of a new way of theologizing in Britain which was to come to fruition in the so-called “Broad Church.” Erskine represents an indigenous British “turn to the subject” antedating the widespread appropriation of continental thought by English and Scottish theologians.

It is by no means insignificant that many of the specially funded Tanner Lectures delivered recently at the annual meetings of the Mormon History Association have dealt, to some degree or another, with early Mormon millenarianism. This occurrence is less surprising when it is relized that the lectures come in the wake of a decade that produced what one historian has called “a veritable blizzard of scholarly and popular writings in the often stormy field of millennialism.”