The exact relationship between Lollardy and the sixteenth-century Reformation long has eluded students of English history. Recent detailed studies of Lollard texts have underlined a continuity of belief and polemic.1 One significant difference, however, is the way in which reformers in the two periods used the commonplace saying that images are “laymen's books.” The Lollards, even those who were the most outspoken critics of images, used Gregory the Great's metaphor to support their positions. In the I 530s the English reformers used the commonplace in similar ways, but by the 1540s they had rejected it altogether. The English reformers, however, did more than merely reject Gregory as an authority. Instead of dismissing the old justification of images as a false sophism, as the continental reformers had done in the 1520s, they appropriated the laymen's-book metaphor for their own polemic, turning it against the iconophiles. Furthermore, they developed the metaphor in a new way that provided a positive alternative for the illiterate, arguing that the simple and unlearned read not from the book of art but rather from the natural world around them.

In dealing with the Anabaptists as a group which discovered or held political and social views of their own, it is first of all desirable to escape from any possible preconceived notion to the effect that the term “Anabaptist” must be used to designate a variety of groups all united to a greater or less degree by some principles or beliefs commonly held. At the outset of the movement such men as Konrad Grebel and Felix Manz, in Switzerland, gave some semblance of unity to the various divisions of the sect by moving from one place to another, and by thus serving somewhat in the capacity of liaison officers. But the movement was still very young when one must say of it that there were a great many small and distinct groups which held nothing of any importance in common, yet which were generally to be designated under the term Anabaptist. Thus, considering the real character of the Anabaptist movement and its chief significance—which I take to be social—the name given to the Anabaptists is less relevant than at first might be supposed. The sectaries did not call themselves Anabaptists; and they resented the use of the name by others. At least from the year 1525 on the name was nothing but an external designation for the various sects. As Sebastian Franck has affirmed, the sects were so disunited amongst themselves that he scarcely knew how to write anything certain or final about them; and he was unable to find even two Anabaptist congregations which held views exactly the same.

William Bradford wrote, at the beginning of his history Of Plymouth Plantation, “I must begin at the very root and rise” of the story, setting events down “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.” He intended to produce an accurate and clear account of the way the Plymouth settlers' lives unfolded. Readers after postmodernism may note with skepticism the governor's claim that his portrayal set down only the perfectly discoverable truth of the matter. Yet certain sparely depicted moments in his history lead us to accept the description “the simple truth” as the only one appropriate to his work.

The ignominious end of the conciliar movement in the mid-fifteenth century strikes many contemporary historians and theologians as one of the tragedies in the history of western civilization. Having shown great promise as an instrument of ecclesiastical reform and credited with ending the scandalous Great Western Schism in 1417, the movement for all practical purposes reached an inglorious end with the signing of the Concordat of Vienna in 1448. Though the tragic dimensions of the movement's demise are somewhat diminished by the truth of Tierney's conjecture that “the merely constitutional reforms emphasized in the conciliar programme could not have produced the much-needed regeneration in the whole life of the Church”, one is nevertheless inclined to view with sadness the neutralization of the nascent democratic aspirations which conciliarism represented.

It is well known that the spokesmen for the early Christian church were hostile to religious images.1 They regarded the Old Testament prohibition against images (Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 5:8) as binding upon Christians.2 But even though Christian apologists like Clement of Alexandria and Origen cited the authority of this prohibition,3 they defended the aniconic worship of Christians from pagan attack by borrowing heavily from pagan writers. The arguments they borrowed portrayed the cult of images as a ridiculously inappropriate form of worship, one that degraded the very gods it sought to honor by likening them to base material, shaped by mere craftsmen.4

During the past two decades scholars have become more appreciatively aware of the medieval scholastic roots of Protestantism and have begun to gain some appreciation, albeit halting, of the scholastic form of Protestantism which dominated the Protestant universities in the seventeenth century. This awareness implies, in the first place, a development beyond the thesis advanced by Lortz and Bouyer that Protestantism was the effect of the decadent nominalist theology of the later Middle Ages. Scholars like Oberman, Hägglund, and Steinmetz have acknowledged much of the continuity but have emphasized the positive character of late medieval thought.

Among the problems posed to one interested in Unitarianism is to explain why it was that Unitarianism evolved out of Presbyterianism in England while it emerged out of Congregationalism in the United States. The problem of the origins of Unitarianism is in this way fashioned into denominational questions. Why did English Presbyterianism become Unitarian? What explains the appearance of Unitarianism in New England Congregationalism? The purpose of this essay is to examine the denominational understanding of the genesis of English Unitarianism.

During the 19th century a concept, in itself neither religious nor anti-religious, modified the thought of a great number of Americans. This was the concept of gradual development. One application of this concept, which had a profound effect upon Congregational thought, was the assumption that insight into religious truth comes only gradually. This view seemed to threaten all formulations of tradition and all embodiments of revelation which had been assumed to be final and complete. Another concept, closely related to that of development, also gravely disturbed the New England theology of the latter 19th century. There was a revival of stress on the immanence of God within the created world. For certain Congregationalists, divine influence upon man came to be viewed as working wholly through the channels of natural law and natural growth, rather than by sudden invasion from without. To conservatives, this stress seemed to blur a central truth in evangelical theology, the perilous chasm between sinful men and the holy, judging God.

That the seventh century Byzantine theologian Maximos the Confessor had an influence on the development of Western as well as Eastern theology is well known through the work of such scholars as Sherwood, Cappuyns, Dräseke, Gilson, and Altaner, for example, for the West, and of von Balthasar, von Ivanka, Grümel, Beck, Brilliantoff, Epifanovic, Hausherr, and Dalmais for the East. But although Maximos' works were apparently known throughout the entire period of Byzantine history, there remains a surprisingly great deal of research to be done to delineate the extent of his influence on specific Byzantine scholars and theologians such as Anastasius of the ninth century, Euthemius Zigabenos and Symeon the “New Theologian” of the eleventh, Nicetas Choniates in the twelfth, Patriarch Gregory of Cyprus and Pachymeres in the thirteenth, the Hesychasts Gregory Palamas and Nicholas Kabasilas and their opponents Nicephorus Gregoras and the Byzantine “Scholastic” John Cyparissiotes of the fourteenth, and, last of all, on the sixteenth century, post-Byzantine Bishop who lived in Venice, Maximos Margounios.

Extensive discussion of the origin and nature of Black Christianity in America has in recent years linked together two issues which are logically distinct: the degree of uniqueness attributable to the beliefs of Afro-Americans, and whether or to what extent their faith sustained resistance to the system of slavery. Abundant evidence that slaveowners hoped Christian instruction would persuade Black people to asquiesce in their bondage has been readily taken for proof that acquiescence was in fact the usual result of their conversion. This questionable conclusion has sometimes led to another: that such religious notions as occasionally inspired resistance were brought from Africa and were uniquely the heritage of Black men. According to this view, the biblical rationales for revolt such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner appear to have employed were merely a gloss upon ideas of freedom and justice which they and their people had long held.

The history of exegesis as a discipline is one of the stepchildren of Church History. As such it has not only been neglected by Church historians, but even if studied, it has received inferior treatment. Surely there is something ironical about an age of theological scholarship which has so self-consciously bought the historical method to study the Bible, but which nevertheless allows scholars to be so un-historical in their approach to the history of its interpretation. Consider that much of the material in the history of exegesis has been mined by scholars whose proper business is the study of the Old and New Testaments; or that the history of interpretation is usually considered a part of biblical studies. Inevitably the question asked by biblical scholars sounds something like this: how does a man, a school, or epoch interpret such and such a passage? Frequently this question issues in monographs tracing the history of interpretations of the chosen passage. The result is usually a catena of citations classifying and cataloguing the answers given to problems in the text. Most often the perspective brought to the material is that of the contemporary exegete, who, either explicitly or implicitly thinks he knows what the passage meant—or at least what it could not mean.

In the early 1840s a wave of enthusiasm for the socialist theory of Charles Fourier swept through American reform circles. Excited utopians in New York, Boston, and elsewhere in the North divided their efforts between publicizing their version of Fourierism, called “Association,” and building model communities or “phalanxes” to illustrate it. While the history and sociology of their nearly three dozen short-lived communal experiments continue to attract scholarly attention, the Associationists' writings have been relatively neglected. Yet the expositions and arguments that won thousands of converts to Fourierism represent an innovation in American religious thought too important to be forgotten: the first extensive attempt to harness the powerful ideas and symbols of Christianity to the emerging worldview of secular socialism.

A period of consensus in American religious historiography has ended, but students of American religion representing a variety of perspectives have recently come to regard Abraham Lincoln, once a subject of great dispute among religionists, as one of the most important and profound of America's theologians and religious leaders, if not the religious center of American history. It is primarily as a spokesman for and symbol of a religious interpretation of American destiny that Lincoln has been placed at this pinnacle, and he has had an especially prominent place in the recent discussion of American civil religion.

The German women's movement, like so much else that was progressive in modern German history, had its origins during the decade culminating in the revolution of 1848. An important and neglected source of German feminism may be found in the radical separatist congregations which appeared in both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant communions during those years. Historical interest in early German feminism has centered almost exclusively on Louise Otto-Peters, partly because of her extraordinary contribution and partly because her personal involvement gives continuity to the women's movement, linking the activities of the 1840s with the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein in 1865, the association which signals the birth of the modern campaign for women's rights in Germany. Religious radicalism on the other hand was stifled in all of its organized manifestations during the reaction of the 1850s. Little survived to remind future feminists of its seminal importance to their cause. Yet Louise Otto-Peters herself felt that the nonconforming religious movement offered the single most important manifestation of female emancipation in pre-revolutionary Germany.

In 1643 the Long Parliament, confronted by war with the king and by religious anarchy, called an assembly of divines to advise it on the steps which must be taken to reform the church. The situation clearly called for decisive action. The bishops, shorn of their political power, had retired to live in their sees or to join the king. Many clergymen, suspected of royalist sympathies or unpopular because of their ritualistic tendencies, had been ejected from their parishes; others, like Thomas Fuller, non-ritualistic but royalist, had left to join the king; while other loyal Anglicans remained in their parishes with the support of their patrons or their church wardens and thus presented a threat to parliament. Furthermore, with the old discipline gone, sectaries had sprung up. To fill the vacant pulpits, to provide a form of ordination for those who objected to prelatical ordination, to substitute for the Prayer Book a simpler form of worship, and, most of all, to clip the wings of the bishops or to replace episcopal government with a system nearer to that of the reformed churches,— these were the tasks which confronted parliament. To accomplish them it went back to an action of 1642, when it had appointed a number of ministers of anti-Laudian, Presbyterian, or Independent views to act as advisors in the settlement which it hoped to reach with the king.

From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel at a dangerous post … As soon as I was alone, I kneeled down, and determined not to rise, but to continue crying and wrestling with God, till He had mercy on me. How long I was in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart, “thy sins are forgiven thee.” My chains fell off; my heart was free. All guilt was gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace. I loved God and all mankind, and the fear of death and hell was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment.

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.

As with other professions, the ministry has a long record of excluding women from its ranks. Virtually all women, unlike all men, have been categorized as laity, although they have failed even to achieve that designation on occasion. George Bernard Shaw, in The Doctor's Dilemma, observed that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” Certainly this has been the case among lay women aspiring to become members of the clergy. But Shaw recognized in his play, Major Barbara (1905), a new kind of Christian minister, one who contested her business-tycoon father on a significant contemporary issue of how best to relieve poverty in Britain. Indirectly Shaw was paying tribute to the influence of Catherine Booth (1829–1890), co-founder of the Salvation Army, who recognized women's powers of intellect and innate equality and elevated them to clerical parity with men.

Focused on three different protestant communities—puritans, pietists, and Methodists—this essay argues that eighteenth-century protestants were actively engaged in contemporary medical debates, and that their engagement was shaped by their faith in providence. Eighteenth-century protestants understood sickness as part of the created order, they interpreted medicine as a divinely-given tool for Christian action on behalf of the suffering, and they recognized an opportunity for mission in their healing efforts. Motivated by their understanding of God's providential oversight of sickness and health, they relied on empirical medicine, read widely in the emerging medical print culture, turned to networks of women's medical knowledge, and participated in theoretical debates over the soul's role in bodily health. This essay represents an important intervention both in medical history, which has overlooked or misunderstood the role of religion in eighteenth-century medical thought and practice, and in religious studies, in which studies of religion and medicine in America have focused almost exclusively on movements emerging since the nineteenth century and the rise of Arminianism.