In 1927 William Warren Sweet observed that “the most important and far-reaching of the schisms in the American churches were caused by Negro slavery and the effects of the bitter contests in the churches over slavery, which began nearly a century ago, are still with us. Therefore any study of the peculiar factors which have determined the course of American church history must of necessity give a prominent place to slavery.” He himself pursued this suggestion in subsequent research.

This article aims to open up and overview some key questions surrounding the Italian Reformation. It argues that the Italian Reformation cannot be viewed as a closed book after the conclusion of the Council of Trent; instead there emerged new forms of engagement between Italy and Protestantism, both within and outside the peninsula. In particular, this article considers Protestant propaganda: the efforts by communities of exiles, especially the Genevan Italian congregation, in printing materials to send into Italy, and also sending personnel at critical junctures, all extremely sensitive to political and religious contexts. The French Wars of Religion provided an immediate model for what could be attempted in Italy, and so addressed sometimes delicate issues such as nicodemism and martyrdom, while also providing practical advice and support to Protestants in Italy. As such, this article shows that Italy was not partitioned by some religious “Iron Curtain” from the rest of Europe, but rather was still viewed as a potential battleground for international Calvinism.

Scholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

The philosophy of Auguste Comte changed irrevocably the intellectual contours of nineteenth-century Europe. In the Anglo-American world, John Stuart Mill was profoundly influenced by Comte's magisterial Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Mill's work became an important conduit through which Americans such as John Fiske, Lester F. Ward and Henry Adams encountered positivism. Comte's controversial later work (especially the Systéme de politique positive [1851–1854]) was also significant, although Mill and others became harsh critics of the so-called ‘second system.’ English admirers of Comte's bizarre social and religious blueprint did include notables, however, such as Frederic Harrison, Harriet Martineau and novelist George Eliot1.

The eighteenth century was an era of conflict and radical change within the Serbian church. After the establishment of Ottoman control in the Balkan peninsula, the Serbian nation remained united solely by the bonds of the church. It was the center of life and the unchallenged leader of the community. However, in the eighteenth century new ideals and new loyalties emerged which threatened the position of predominance previously enjoyed by the church. Religious nationalism gradually gave way before secular nationalism as the ideas of the enlightenment took root among the Serbs living within the Habsburg empire, until by the end of the century the church as an instrument of national unification had been relegated to a position of secondary importance. Moreover, the change was the result not only of the absorption of western thought by the Serbian intellectuals, but also of the rivalries of the Christian churches in the Balkans, a conflict whose roots are to be found in this century.

In 1263 Bonaventure of Bagnoreggio, Minister General of the Franciscan order, complained about recent turmoil between the Friars Minor and Franciscan nuns in a letter addressed to the Provincial Minister of Aragon: “You are undoubtedly aware, dear Brother, just how much our Order has been plagued up to now with threats, troubles, and litigation occasioned by the monasteries of the Order of Saint Clare. This has come to the point where they have petitioned the court of the Supreme Pontiff alleging, among other charges against us, that the customary services provided for them by our brothers are in fact prescribed by law; thus our brothers have proposed to have nothing more to do with them unless they first recognize our complete freedom by public written documents sent to the Holy Father.”

Any study of France's political history since the Liberation must inevitably attempt to explain the sudden emergence in 1944 of that somewhat unconventional and ambiguous political grouping known as the Mouvement Républicain Populaire. Almost overnight the new party, despite its obscure origins and unfamiliar program, succeeded in winning the largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly and in the years since the war has provided France with some of her most prominent leaders. Although the M. R. P. has declined in parliamentary strength in recent years, it seems probable that the party of Robert Schuman and Georges Bidault will continue to play an important role in French politics.

Judged by any standard, Marsilius (Marsiglio, 1270–1343) of Padua represented one of the most strikingly innovative thinkers in the history of Christian thought. Because he was one of the pioneers in the struggle for an uncontested erastianism and because of his forthright condemnation of the papacy, it was inevitable that his epitaph would be shrouded in controversy. A movement that clearly evidenced a positive dependence on Marsilius' thought was the Henrician Reformation. Although many students of the Henrician Reformation (notably A.G. Dickens) have recognized the figure of Marsilius looming in the background, none have delineated the precise relationship of his thought to the English Reformation. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, Marsilius, not Machiavelli, Wycliff, Erasmus or Tyndale furnished the prevailing ideological framework within which the Henrician Reformation was justified.

So far as religious affairs are concerned, the colonial period of our history begins with the planting of the first permanent English colony in 1607, guided by the intention to perpetuate in the new land the religious patterns to which the mother country had grown accustomed. Chief of these for our purposes was uniformity enforced by the civil power. The period culminates just 180 years later with the complete rejection of this central intention in the provisions for national religious freedom in the Constitution (1787) and First Amendment (1791).

The second general council of Ephesus was convened on August 8, 449, and adjourned some fourteen days later by the legates of Theodosius II, who promptly confirmed the council's canons and decrees.1 It had been as regular, or irregular, as Nicea I or Ephesus I had been, and far more general than the Constantinopolitan synod of 381. Its chief importance lay in registering another splendid victory for the Alexandrines. The “school” of Antioch was shattered beyond repair; Pope Leo and the Westerners were walled off and weakened; the bare notion of “two natures” was branded as Nestorian; every principal see in the East was manned by a henchman of Dioscoros. Moreover, the emperor and his grand chamberlain (the eunuch Chrysaphius, godson to Eutyches) were prepared to support Alexandrine policy with police power.

Although many scholars now recognize the turn of the millennium as the key point in the development of medieval civilization and the birth of Europe, there remains a tendency to look to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the period in which cultural and intellectual norms emerged that would define medieval civilization. This cultural flourishing, long ago recognized as a renaissance by Charles Henry Haskins, has, in recent years, taken on more ominous tones. Certainly this was a period of great intellectual fervor, but it was also, as R. I. Moore has shown, a time of persecution. Just as medieval theologians offered positive definitions of the Christian faith and Christian society, they defined the “other”—the enemy who stood in stark contrast to all that was true and good in society. And in Western Christendom there were no greater enemies than the Jew and the heretic. Indeed, it has generally been recognized that Jewish fortunes increasingly worsened during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.

The significance of captives in the history of empire has come to the fore in several recent books and articles. Linda Colley starts her intriguing study of this theme with the stories of two famous, if legendary, British captives—Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver—explaining how each represents a different conception of empire: the former a shipwrecked ex-slave turned conqueror and colonizer; the latter an overseas adventurer who is captured, humiliated, and terrorized but ultimately transformed by the values of his captors into a critic of his own society. Far from the heroes of Defoe and Swift, female captives featured in conversion accounts on the east Roman frontiers represent another response to captivity in a very different imperial world—that of the Roman and Iranian empires of late antiquity. These protagonists neither came to dominate the kingdoms in which they were held nor assimilated the culture of their captors but maintained their identity, their customs, and their religion in captivity. Indeed, these captives went further still, actually transforming the peoples and governments under which they were held from their very positions of subordination.

By the mid-seventeenth century, radical protestant tolerationists in Britain and the British Atlantic began to conceive of religious liberty as a civil liberty applicable to all subjects, in contrast to contemporary puritans who limited toleration to orthodox protestants. This essay seeks to explain why certain puritans, however small in number, came to adopt radical views on toleration in contrast to the religious mainstream in the Anglophone world. Drawing upon a longer history of ecclesiastical independence than considered in the existing scholarship on religious toleration, it identifies a hitherto unexplored relationship between ecclesiastical independence in England and the Atlantic World.

A delegation of Illinois Indians on a diplomatic mission astonished the residents of New Orleans in 1730 with their ardent participation in the Catholic ritual life of the colonial capital. The Jesuit Mathurin le Petit observed that during their three–week stay “[the Illinois] charmed us by their piety, and by their edifying life. Every evening they recited the rosary … and every morning they heard me say Mass.” People crowded into the church to witness the spectacle of “savage” Indians worshiping and singing before the altar. The highlight for the audience was a responsive Gregorian chant in which Ursuline nuns “chanted the first Latin couplet, … and the Illinois continued the other couplets in their language in the same tone.” The Illinois appeared to be very well educated in Catholic practice, pausing during their daily activities to recite a variety of prayers. “To listen to them,” concluded the missionary, “you would easily perceive that they took more delight and pleasure in chanting these holy Canticles, than the generality of the Savages.” Le Petit was correct in a sense. The performance that so delighted the people of New Orleans represented the results of more than a generation of intercultural and linguistic exchange between the Illinois and the French.

This essay compares two neglected German translations of Jonathan Edwards's famous Faithful Narrative (1737). Both were published in 1738 but by different circles of German Pietists—one Lutheran and centered around Halle, one Reformed and located in the Nether Rhine area. Both were more intimately woven into transatlantic evangelical communication networks than has been understood. Each version show that the news about the American awakening was received enthusiastically as an encouraging sign of God's advancing kingdom, a model for inner-churchly revivals, and an argument for the legitimacy of Pietist conventicles at home. Comparing the two translations also reveals how Edwards was appropriated in quite divergent ways and with varying attitudes by the two groups, reflecting their distinct regional, denominational and social contexts, as well as specific religious needs and dogmatic emphases. While both texts evince that German Pietism very much partook in the emergence of a transatlantic evangelical consciousness, they simultaneously show how the formation of such an ecumenical identity was complicated by persisting confessional and regional differences. Finally, the two German translations of Edwards's narrative illustrate that the meaning of these revivals as part of a larger Protestant evangelical awakening was negotiated not only among Anglo-American evangelicals but also among Continental Pietists.

In reading many early Christian texts from and about Egypt, one is struck by the importance of space for the ascetic lifestyle. Whether it be Antony locked in his desert fortress, the tightly arranged cells of Kellia in the Apopthegmata Patrum, or the landscape of the desert in so much hagiographical literature, the space in which the early Christians practiced ascetic renunciation was as infused with as much meaning as the ascetic practices themselves. Since few texts with descriptions of early ascetic space survive, studies have been left largely to archaeologists and art historians, not historians of Christianity. Only a handful of ascetic authors from the fourth through sixth centuries wrote about the theological significance they found in the building of churches. These include the wealthy Latin patron Paulinus of Nola (Italy), two anonymous members of the Pachomian monasteries in Egypt, and the Egyptian archimandrite Shenoute. The churches built for each of these late antique communities held deep theological significance. They symbolized the ascetic endeavors undertaken at those communities. Since for each writer, the ascetic struggle was constituted in slightly different terms, with different goals, practices, and interpretations of those practices, so were the church buildings imbued with different meanings. Yet, in each case, the church held meaning beyond its mere walls. Each was constructed as much by a theology and a discourse of ascetic discipline as it was by wood, brick, and stone.

This article examines the language policies of sixteenth-century Mexico, aiming more generally to illuminate efforts by Mexican bishops to foster conversions to Christianity. At various points throughout the colonial era, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church propagated the use of Castilian among Amerindians; leaders of these institutions, however, also encouraged priests to study indigenous languages. That Spanish authorities appear to have never settled on a firm language policy has puzzled modern scholars, who have viewed the Crown and its churchmen as vacillating between “pro-indigenous” and “pro-Castilian” sentiments. This article suggests, however, that Mexico's bishops intentionally extended simultaneous support to both indigenous languages and Castilian. Church and Crown officials tended to avoid firm ideological commitments to one language; instead they made practical decisions, concluding that different contexts called for distinct languages. An examination of the decisions made by leading churchmen offers insight into how they helped to create a Spanish-American religious landscape in which both indigenous and Spanish elements co-existed.

Among the reasons for the emergence of American denominationalism, the impact of the separation of church and state has never been under-rated by scholars. The same is true of the religious pluralism of the nation. Other environmental conditions of comparable importance have been listed but those who recognize the toughness and adaptability of the modern American denominational structure have reason to ask whether historians have done full justice to its internal dynamic. The reaction against denominational history in the grand style is, of course, well warranted. Over against “denominational historians who can recount the achievements of the several denominations as separate bodies, the reasons for their separateness, and the grounds of their greatness and glory,” W. E. Garrison wrote, “we must concern ourselves chiefly with the movements of the common Christian mind, the issues which drive planes of cleavage through all denominations transverse to those which divide them from each other.…” Some of these unitive issues are American-made; others are rooted in Europe. But the denomination, as Garrison recognized, is the mode in which American church history manifests itself, a vehicle whose continuities must be grasped if modern American church-manship is to be understood.

A sketch of the struggle for religious liberty during the course of the last four hundred years will be attempted in this paper. Attention will first be focussed on the theories and factors affecting persecution and tolerance on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. Then the administrative aspects of the subject will be considered alike from the broader standpoint of the structure of the church and of the state and from the more specific angle of the handling of dissent by political authority. Finally brief consideration will be devoted to residual and perennial problems of constraint and freedom.