In working out his own understanding of historical causation, Eusebius had to deal with the great issues of the pagan Graeco-Roman historiographical tradition. He had to reject, alter or adapt the classical understanding of Fate, Fortune, Nature and human free will in order to work out a coherent Christian understanding of history and the forces that shaped it.

Female monasticism and the conversion of the Jews were both major concerns for the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as for Italian ruling elites, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Hence, the monachization of baptized Jewish girls acquired a unique symbolic significance. Moreover, during this period cases of demonic possession were on the rise, and so were witchcraft accusations. This article explores a case from late sixteenth-century Mantua in which Jewish conversion, female monachization, demonic possession and witch-hunting all came into play in a violent drama. Drawing on unpublished documents as well as on chronicles and hagiographies, the article elucidates the mental toll that conversion and monachization took on the Jewess Luina, who later became known as Sister Margherita. It delineates her life, which culminated with her diagnosis as a demoniac, and analyzes the significance that this etiology held for the energumen—whose affliction was attributed to her ongoing contacts with Jews—and for Mantua's Jews. The article argues that the anxiety provoked by suspicions that a formerly Jewish nun reverted to Judaism was so profound, that it led to the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta, the only Jew ever to be executed as a witch in the Italian peninsula.

In a separatist congregation in London in 1594 a storm was brewing. The church's pastor, Francis Johnson, imprisoned for his noncon-formist activities, had recently married, and Francis's younger brother George, also incarcerated, was deeply troubled about his new sister-in-law Thomasine. George Johnson feared Francis was “blinded, bewitched, and besotted with the slie [sly] heights of the subtile proud woman,” and he considered it his duty as a good Christian and concerned brother to help “reforme” the situation. George's central grievance against Thomasine, a young widow before her marriage to Francis, was her excessive pride—she was “much noted” for it, he observed, which “became not a Pastor's wife, specially he being under persecution: in Prison: and often looking for death.” For George, as for other nonconforming Protestants who believed that one's outward behavior revealed one's inward moral state, his sister-in-law's pride was so offensive because it was so publicly and extravagantly displayed upon her body, in velvet, lace, whalebone, and gold. George wanted to “shew” Thomasine “that proud apparel and fashions of worldly dames were not decent in a Pastor[']s wife: that the creatures [material things], though lawful to be used, yet [are] not to be abused.”

Scholars have frequently noted that the American temperance movement had close ties with Protestantism throughout its long history. The Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, generally viewed as the founding father of temperance, helped spark the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826 with his Six Sermons on drunkenness. Later in the century devout Protestant laypersons, such as Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leader Frances Willard and Nebraska congressman and perennial presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan, took up leadership of the cause. In the early years of this century, as Protestants began to divide into warring liberal and evangelical camps, Prohibition was one—and perhaps the only—issue which could unite most Protestants, from the firebreathing revivalist Billy Sunday on the one hand to the scholarly, liberal Walter Rauschenbusch on the other.1

During the late nineteenth century, James Walker Hood was bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. In his forty-four years as bishop, half of that time as senior bishop of the denomination, Reverend Hood was instrumental in planting and nurturing his denomination's churches throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. Founder of North Carolina's denominational newspaper and college, author of five books including two histories of the AMEZ Church, appointed assistant superintendent of public instruction and magistrate in his adopted state, Hood's career represented the broad mainstream of black denominational leaders who came to the South from the North during and after the Civil War. Concurrently, Grand Master Hood superintended the southern jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge of New York and acted as a moving force behind the creation of the region's black Masonic lodges—often founding these secret male societies in the same places as his fledgling churches. At his death in 1918, the Masonic Quarterly Review hailed Hood as “one of the strong pillars of our foundation.” If Bishop Hood's life was indeed, according to his recent biographer, “a prism through which to understand black denominational leadership in the South during the period 1860–1920,” then what does his leadership of both the Prince Hall Lodge and the AMEZ Church tell us about the nexus of fraternal lodges and African American Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century?

Just as God condemns and curses the Roman Antichrist,

so without any doubt at all he also curses the new Caesaropapacy … in which governmental officials station themselves in God's temple and puff themselves up against God and the church … as they compose and promulgate new decrees contrary to what Christ has ordained for his ministry, and then decide to subject [Christ's ministers] to the punishment of exile and condemnation.

“Let, whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon.” So retorted the Arianizing Emperor Constantius at the stormy council of Milan in 355 after he had become sole ruler of the Empire and was able to give full expression to his Arian sympathies. Whether Athanasius has accurately recorded his language is not certain; that he has captured the intention of Constantius in a vivid phrase is indisputable. It takes its place alongside James I's summary disposition of the Hampton Court Puritans, “No bishop, no king,” to be set over against another series of resounding affirmations of a contrary significance: Ambrose of Milan's “the emperor is in the Church,” and Andrew Melville's retort to the same James, “Sir, thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdoms in Scotland.”

In his memoir, German chaplain Hans Leonhard describes a visit to a military hospital during World War II. Leonhard entered a ward full of men with sexually transmitted diseases. “So you're a pastor?” one patient jeered. “We don't need one of them. You just want to tell us those stories about cattle breeders and pimps.” The phrasecame from the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, he dubbed the Old Testament a collection of “stories of pimps and cattle traders.” Members of the pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement popularized Rosenberg's phrase in church circles. Leonhard, accustomed to hostile reactions, answered the taunt with a challenge: “Tell me just one such story,” he said to the man. “If you can tell me even one, I'll leave the room immediately and never bother you again.” All the patients looked at their comrade. “I can't think of any right now,” he finally said. The others laughed, but he did not give up. “You probably want to tell us something about praying,” he accused Leonhard. “Well, a real man doesn” The chaplain countered with another question: “Were you at the front?” he wanted to know. There was a pause before the man muttered, “We from the reserves have done our duty, too.” According to Leonhard, that admission ended the exchange. The chaplain sat down with the rest of the men and talked about the Old Testament and about prayer.

In the period of the Prussian reform movement, Friedrich Schleiermacher, pastor and intellectual, found a key political role in the Prussian state. Some aspects of Schleiermacher's singular public life during these years were considered by Wilhelm Dilthey in his short article on Schleiermacher's political thought and activity, written almost a hundred years ago. But Dilthey never expanded this preliminary analysis which was, in any case, partial in coverage and limited in critical approach. The recovery of a vast body of material and information unavailable to Dilthey as well as greater historical perspective necessitate a thorough reconsideration of Schleiermacher's activities during these critical years.

Cannibals - mountebanks - charlatans - pious and whining hypocrites - necromancers - pseudo-Christians - mystery mongers. These are among the epithets which Thomas Jefferson applied to the clergy of the Protestant denominations and of the Roman Catholic Church as well. It was they who “perverted” the principles of Jesus “into an engine for enslaving mankind”; it was the Christian “priesthood” who had turned organized religion into a “mere contrivance to filch wealth and power” for themselves; they were the ones who throughout history had persecuted rational men for refusing to swallow “their impious heresies.”

From their origins in the twelfth century to their support for and involvement in the Reformation in the sixteenth, the Waldensian heretics professed nonviolence as one of their beliefs. Later Protestant and Catholic polemicists equated the profession of nonviolence with a policy and bestowed upon the sect a reputation as one of the precursors of religious pacifism. More recent scholars have noted that the heretics at least occasionally employed violence. I will argue that lay Waldensian believers, called credentes, reacted violently to persecution and learned to employ aggression in pursuit of political goals. In the later Middle Ages, at least, Waldensians resorted to violence on enough occasions and in enough different locations to justify dropping the idea that they were a nonviolent group. Their use of violence did become more sophisticated—that is, more closely connected to political goals—during the fifteenth century as access to representatives of the state increased.

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

Henry Cardinal Manning wrote in 1863 that he wanted English Catholics to be “downright, masculine, and decided Catholics—more Roman than Rome, and more ultramontane than the Pope himself.” Given this uncompromising call for militant, masculine Roman Catholicism in Protestant Victorian England, frequently cited by scholars, it may seem surprising that a laywomen's movement would have emerged in Great Britain. In 1906, however, a national Catholic Women's League (CWL), linked closely to Rome, to the English clergy, and to lay social action, emerged in step with the aggressive Catholicism outlined by Manning 40 years earlier. The Catholic Women's League was led by a coterie of noblewomen, middle-class professionals, and clergy, many of them former Anglicans. The founder, Margaret Fletcher (1862–1943), and the league's foremost members were converts; the spiritual advisor, Rev. Bernard Vaughan, was the son of a convert. A short list of the clergy affiliated with the CWL reveals an impressive Who's Who in the Catholic hierarchy and in social work in the early twentieth century: Francis Cardinal Bourne (Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935), Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (a convert and well-known author), and influential Jesuits Bernard Vaughan, Charles Plater, Cyril Martindale, Joseph Keating, Leo O'Hea and Joseph Rickaby. The CWL was born from a joining of convert zeal and episcopal-clerical support to a tradition of lay initiative among English Catholics.

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.”

Charges of social irresponsibility have frequently been hurled against the medieval mystics, in their own day as in our yet more activist age. Mysticism and monasticism, to whose discipline the mystics owed much, have often been condemned for selfish withdrawal from public obligation. A major cause of this unjustifiable indictment is doubtless traceable to a predominant area of ignorance within the Western World. This is the growing unawareness of the balance maintained in the Christian tradition between contemplative worship of the Divine and active service of the human.

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) is best known to the world as the pioneer of modern educational theories and methods. More particularly is he remembered as the author of a series of elementary Latin textbooks for which many generations of schoolboys in the bygone days have called him blessed. But although he has richly deserved the praise he has received for his pedagogical reforms, that contribution by no means exhausts his astonishingly many-sided accomplishments. For he was the author of almost two hundred treatises (some of them rather forbiddingly bulky tomes, not all so far published), dealing with scientific, linguistic, pedagogical, philosophical, political, literary, and above all religious and theological subjects. He was likewise a fervent enthusiast for religious and political peace during one of the most disturbed periods of European history—the era of the Thirty Years' War. And above all, he was a convinced believer in pansophy—the principle of unification of all scientific, philosophical, political, and religious knowledge into one all-embracing, harmonious world-view. Previously, the term pansophy was used by Peter Laurenberg (1585- 1639) for an encyclopaedic compend of universal knowledge. Comenius gave it a deeper connotation, that of correlating all knowledge by means of an unifying principle. Thus he endeavored to produce an encyclopaedic, unified system of education which would fuse into one whole all knowledge, ethics, and religion, and by having all people educated in this system, would ultimately secure universal peace. His pansophy is, therefore, the dominant principle of almost everything he wrote, pervading it either explicitly or implicitly. Surprisingly enough, by reason of the recent discovery of Comenius' long lost pansophic corpus, we hope soon to learn more about this important aspect of his work than we have known hitherto.

Newman's famous poem “Lead, Kindly Light” (originally titled “The Pillar of the Cloud”) was written on his return trip to England from Italy in 1833. He had been touring the Mediterranean countries for eight months, the last three of which were spent battling a near-fatal illness in Sicily. On recovering from this illness, he returned to England rejuvenated by his trip and eager for some pending ecclesiastical project. Immediately on his return to Oxford he became involved in the early organizational discussions from which the Oxford Movement evolved. In light of this intensified engagement in reform activities on his return to England, his poem “Lead, Kindly Light” has impressed his biographers as a revealing statement of his resolve to engage in those activities from which he had shrunk only months before. The lines “I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on” and “Pride ruled my will; remember not past years” seem especially to express this shift in resolve. The autobiographical thrust of the poem has therefore seemed quite unmistakable.1

The emerging fundamentalist movement made its first foray into extra-ecclesiastical politics during the League of Nations controversy of 1919–20. Both of the two main wings of fundamentalism—dispensational premillennialists and conservative Calvinists—took part in this controversy because both of them regarded the proposed League as an important, inherently religious issue. Both kinds of fundamentalists opposed the League, and both used the ratification debate to articulate their own types of Christian anti-internationalism. In the process they lent much Christian rhetoric to the political opponents of the League, the “Irreconcilables,” who were interested in exploiting it for their ostensibly purely secular critiques. Despite the fundamentalists' success in preventing League ratification, the controversy made them acutely aware of the political power and appeal of their liberal Protestant rivals. These had exerted themselves on behalf of the League, imparted their own religious complexion to the pro-League argument, and, not least, had managed officially to enlist almost all denominations to their side.