The Concordat of Vienna (1448) was one of the most suggestive historical phenomena of the fifteenth century. Drafted in the midst of a century characterized by diplomatic intrigue and institutional flux, and ratified amid the pageantry of traditional ceremony, it implicitly suggested the restoration of order and stability. The agreement appeared to signify the re-establishment of papal supremacy, the destruction of conciliarism, and even the partial restoration of the medieval Christian Commonwealth by virtue of the submission of the Empire to Rome. Contemporary notions relating to the Concordat of Vienna are invariably drawn from the works of the papal historians Ludwig Pastor and Mandell Creighton. Both viewed it as a papal victory and a defeat of the Council of Basel. F. X. Seppelt took a more cautious position and suggested that the eventual implementation of the agreement brought many concessions to the territorial princes. Joseph Gill in his recent biography of Pope Eugenius almost entirely bypassed this phase of the pontiff's activity. Only Bertram's monograph on the concordats of the later middle ages devoted some space to the 1448 pact. While presenting some interesting conclusions, he failed to adequately interpret any one concordat in the light of its own peculiar political background.

This contribution analyzes the views held by Danish and Norwegian church people regarding the welfare state, as expressed in the period when the general debate on the welfare state culminated in both countries. Generally speaking, religion played a relatively limited role in international welfare state research, which can be referred to as “blind to religion.” Tough socio-economic variables, well-established political actors, and government interests dominate the field. There are examples of religion as one among many variables, but when it has been ascribed explanatory value, it predominantly has been in relation to southern and continental European welfare models, because the focus has been on Catholicism. In recent years, the frequently mentioned “cultural turn” has made its entrance into comparative welfare research; yet, even then culture and religion are often assigned a modest role in “the black box,” which is invoked when the “harder” data are insufficient. Most recently, historians and church historians have launched a discussion on the Lutheran Nordic welfare state, but so far this discussion has not analyzed empirically the role of the church in the golden age of the welfare state. In this article, we go directly to those involved and examine what the church actors really felt about the post-war welfare state.

One of the principal areas of disagreement between the followers of Martin Luther and the Swiss reformers during the Reformation concerned the Lord's Supper. As one church historian has observed, “every dissension concerning the Gospel necessarily expresses itself in dissension over the Lord's Supper.” Not surprisingly, therefore, liturgical variations in the celebration of the communion service became major points of controversy as well. Unfortunately, modern scholarship has often overlooked or underestimated the significance of these differences.

The years 1820–1850 were characterized by a remarkable transition in American education. A decisive shift occurred in the philosophy and patterns of educating American women which would have marked social, economic, and political ramifications in antebellum America. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, females were seen as weaker intellectually than males; they were denied the right to an equal education with males; and they were educated haphazardly, with few formal opportunities beyond a district school education for any but the rich. Even the “advanced” education at dame schools, boarding schools, and female academies sought only to further domestic skills, social polish, and parlor savvy.

In the autumn of 1495 Desiderius Erasmus began his theological studies in Paris and during the next four years sampled the wares of Scotists lecturing at the University. From the Augustinian monastery at Steyn, where Erasmus pursued his own studies in secular literature under the disapproving eye of his abbot, the University of Paris must have seemed like a bank of resplendent lights drawing the Christian scholar into the company of learned and erudite colleagues. Exposure to scholasticism and to those who came to sharpen their skills in scholarly disputation soon convinced Erasmus that the light had been an ignis fatuus and that the university was no place for a free and eclectic spirit. Erasmus was as unhappy as a graduate student who realizes too late that he has enrolled in the wrong department at the wrong school. He bitterly complained that the schoolmen were sectarian, contentious, and confused; and he deplored the sparing and deleterious accommodations at the College de Montaigu, his place of residence. A small cadre of Parisian humanists who shared Erasmus' predilection for secular literature furnished the young scholar with some diversion, but Erasmus required little prompting to hasten from Paris. When William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, asked Erasmus to accompany him across the Channel to England in 1499, the Dutch scholar could not have been more pleased. By late summer he had made the crossing and had visited London, and by October he was dining in Oxford with Richard Charnock, Prior of St. Mary's College.

William Penn intended no new synthesis of thought. His practical social reforms, combining the Quakers' radical hope for the total transforming of men, ethics and society by God's Spirit with a humanist's trust in reason and conscience already at work in all men universally, were a new stance for Quakers. But Friends noted mainly his exuberance and pragmatism and his uncritical openness about ideas. In Europe and America as a whole, he was best known in his own time for his practical career: he was the man of peace with the Indians, the founder of Pennsylvania, the champion of toleration. For these he was later celebrated in the paintings of “the Peaceable Kingdom” and the writings of Voltaire.

Over the course of a century, the self-understanding of the Roman Catholic Church has undergone a dramatic change, as seen, for example, in the contrasting ecclesiologies of the last two ecumenical councils. The following juxtaposition of representative texts from Vatican I and Vatican II reveals this radical shift.

In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, interspersed with a few intense face-to-face visits in the convent. Because the manuscript arriving that day was a thirteenth-century woman's mystical treatise (the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead), and because Margaret and her sisters in the convent Maria Medingen used this woman's text in what could initially seem peculiar and dynamic ways, this manuscript and these letters can tell us much about the authority and performance of women's mysticism in medieval religion. Mechthild's and Heinrich's texts serve as key examples, which reveal how women's mystical texts were authoritative in the history of Christianity. Namely, medieval audiences assessed mystical authority on the basis of the text's ability to produce the experience in them, and mystical texts required proper performance in order to unleash their generative power.

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

In a letter to the people of Florence in the early part of 1067, the ardent reformer, Peter Damian, denounced a group of monks as locustae. These unnamed monks—whom it has long been accepted were the Vallombrosans—had been waging a campaign against their bishop, Peter Mezzabarba of Florence, whom they accused of obtaining his office by simony. Although Damian, who had been cardinalbishop of Ostia as well as prior of the eremitical community at Fonte Avellana, readily acknowledged that Mezzabarba might have a case to answer at Pope Alexander II's forthcoming council in Rome, he condemned their intrusion into matters of ecclesiastical politics that were none of their business. Yet it was clearly more than a matter of inappropriate activities. For he went on to dismiss in the bitterest of terms the dangerous pretensions of these monks to a superior holiness. Referring to their sanctity as odiosa, Damian concluded by saying that if monks like the Vallombrosans wanted to be holy they should not flaunt a spiritual arrogance in the face of weaker brethren. For Damian, the duty of monks was strictly defined by function: their calling was to weep for sins, not to announce them.

This article analyzes the views of Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) in relation to the subject of American slavery. Popular mythology, especially that propagated by the exponents of Neo-Confederacy, would have us believe that all those who criticized the system of chattel slavery that existed in antebellum America were either secularists or adherents to heterodox religious opinions. In order to debunk this myth, this article seeks to demonstrate the solid antislavery credentials of this theologically conservative group of Presbyterians by examining the writings of various Covenanters on chattel slavery. As this agitation against slavery took place in a context of significant internal strife between the Covenanters over the issue of the civil magistrate's power circa sacra, this paper will consider how the antislavery arguments of Thomas Houston and John Paul diverged in order to suit their respective positions on civil magistracy. Related to this is the Covenanters' critique of the US Constitution, which Reformed Presbyterians rejected owing to its proslavery sentiments. Hence this article provides us with an important insight into antislavery ideology and developments within Reformed theology in relation to the state during the nineteenth century. Finally, consideration will be given to understanding the complex response of the Reformed Presbyterians to the American Civil War and to debates between the Irish Covenanters and their American brethren on the proper reaction to the conflict.

The late ancient body is a historiographical problem. In the combined lights of feminist, Foucaultian, and post-Foucaultian methodologies, much recent scholarship on bodies in late antiquity has focused on bodies as sites on which power relations are enacted and as discourses through which ideologies are materialized. Contemporary concern with definitions and representations of the posthuman, however—for example, in medical technologies that expand the capacities of particular human bodies, in speculative pursuit of the limits of avatars, or in the technological pursuit of artificial intelligence or artificial life—seem both to underline the fundamental lability of the body, and to require a broadening of scholarly focus beyond the traditional visible boundaries of the human organism. At the same time, scholarship on the posthuman emphasizes contemporaneity and futurity to an extent that may seem to preclude engagement with the premodern. I would like to suggest here that doubt about the boundaries of human embodiment is a useful lens through which to reconsider some very traditional questions in the history of Christianity, and that we may begin to think of bodies in Christian premodernity in terms of what we might call their pre-humanity, that is, as fundamentally open to extension, transformation, and multiple instantiation. The figure on whom I focus is Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, who, I argue, defined his own body in such a way that he was able to instantiate physically in dozens of living human bodies, at least two dead human bodies, thousands of angelic bodies, and four church buildings. Ambrose's dynamic conception of his episcopal body was formed within a complex political and theological situation, so questions concerning the political ideology of bodies remain very much at issue. I add to these questions a concern for premodern uncertainty about how to recognize a body, both when it is visible and, perhaps more importantly, when it is not.

The myth of the American West has become the nation's greatest cultural creation. From nineteenth-century German writer Karl May to the present day Solidarity movement in Poland, images drawn from the frontier West have inspired people throughout the globe. Although scholars have spent years trying to separate fact from fiction in this tale, most have concluded that it is impossible. “The myth,” historian Robert Athearn has noted, “is an essential part of the western past.”1

In Contra Celsum Origen briefly states his approach to constructing a theological system. He says, “… anyone who constructs a Christian philosophy will need to argue the truth of his doctrines with proofs of all kinds, taken both from the divine scriptures and from rational arguments (logois akolouthias). ” Origen here specifies a twofold basis for theology—Scripture and rational argument. He often speaks explicitly of these two in his system. For example, in De principiis II.v.3 he says that he has refuted the heretics by arguments drawn from the authority of Scriptures (ex auctoritate … scripturarum) but it will not be unfitting if he discusses the matter from the standpoint of rational argument (ex ratione … consequentiae=akolouthia). And again at the end of the preface of De principiis, this programmatic statement occurs: Anyone desiring to construct a system out of the articles of faith just listed will do so “… with the aid of such illustrations and declarations as he shall find in the holy scriptures and of such conclusions as he shall ascertain to follow logically from them when rightly understood.”

Of all the dissidents with which Saint Boniface, the “Apostle of the Germans” in the eighth century, had to deal, those whom the sources reveal the most clearly are Aldebert and Clement, the former representing an eccentricity much in the manner of the later and more famous Tanchelm, the latter representing the reactionary resistance of the lax clergy to moral reform. Though these heretics have often received mention,1 no one has seen fit to study them closely, doubtless owing to the mistaken prejudice that any instance of heresy in this early period must have been isolated and of little general significance. We may now see that they are in many ways representative of eighth century heresy as a whole.

A review in the New York Times observed that “the church abandoned the Negro in the 19th century and took up Hugh Hefner in the 20th. Churchmen in America have always been followers instead of leaders.” While this wry comment is not entirely true, it has enough truth to keep clergymen from undue selfesteem. It is clear, on the other hand, that churchmen on occasion have been leaders as well as followers. An equally wry comment attributed to Lincoln Steffens provides a clue to the clergy's leadership role. Americans, Steffens remarked, never learned to do wrong knowingly. Whenever they compromised with principle, they had to find a pious justification for it. Clerical leadership was especially prominent in the period prior to World War I, since this was a time when the American public looked to the pulpit for its pious justifications.

In 430, Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, wrote in his treatise Adversus Nestorium that we must put away idle questioning and “receive with faith the simple and undefiled tradition.” Which tradition did he have in mind? About the same time, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, defended a priest who denied the appellation theotokos to the Virgin Mary. Nestorius claimed the term was not in accord with the tradition. Which tradition did he have in mind?

Thomas Müntzer, in the well known words of the Apostle Paul, has come to be ‘all things to all men,’ albeit only after his death. But already during his lifetime opinion was strongly divided over this man. Certainly he had his staunch supporters1 as well as his bitter enemies, but there were also those who saw both good and evil in him. Müntzer's most adamant opponent was undoubtedly Martin Luther himself, who had no intention of standing idly by while his ‘Reformation’ went up in the smoke of revolution.2 Those, however, who saw both good and evil in Müntzer were not involved in the immediate struggle but witnessed events from a distance—the Anabaptists of Zurich under the leadership of Conrad Grebel.3

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.

In most areas where Christianity was confronted during the four centuries after the Hegira by Islam the Christian religion suffered setbacks or was eclipsed in some measure, but it did not disappear. In North Africa, however, Christianity was not merely eclipsed, it was supplanted. Tertullian, the “Father of Latin Christianity,” had labored in North Africa during the latter years of the second century and the early years of the third. Victor I (189–99), the first bishop of Rome to write in Latin, and, according to Prof. G. LaPiana the first “Pope,” had been North African in origin.