Severe economic depression had the Roman world in its grip during the middle of the third century A. D.; a condition from which the Mediterranean countries never fully recovered. There is much evidence to show that the economic structure of the Empire was crumbling. Very soon the outlying territories of the Empire were overrun by barbarians, trade collapsed, and brigandage and piracy reappeared on a large scale. All of this was accompanied by a rapid rise in the prices of the commodities of life. To-day we look for the causes of economic depressions in intricate and far-reaching social forces. In the third century Romans of the old school had a much more simple and direct explanation. When the Empire fell on hard times and disaster stalked the corners there was only one cause: the gods who had given Rome her power and the Empire its prosperity in the years gone by were being neglected, foreign gods and oriental cults had usurped the religious fervor of the people, and the venerable gods of the Eternal City were angered. The remedy was likewise simple: revive and stimulate the worship of the ancient gods of Rome, thus appeasing their anger, and prosperity would return.

In view of Martin Luther's prominence as a person who changed the course of world history with his Reformation and given the abundance of historical sources on the reformer's life and work, the great extent to which archaeological discoveries of the last fifteen years have shed new and sometimes surprising light on the reformer's life might seem astonishing. The study at hand presents these new insights by introducing the results of archaeological excavations that took place on the premises of Martin Luther's parents’ home in Mansfeld and in the garden of the Luther House in Wittenberg, which for more than thirty years was the home of the reformer. The discoveries made in both places allow new insights into the reformer's and his family's everyday life. They enrich, or even correct, our knowledge about these aspects with fascinating, new, and sometimes surprising facets. The majority of the archaeological finds took place prior to the exhibition “Finding Luther: Archaeologists on the Reformer's Trail” at the State Museum of Prehistory Halle (Saale) (2008/2009) and in the framework of the project “Luther Archaeology” at the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt (2010–2015). These finds, as well as architectural, archival, and scientific investigations, shed new light on Martin Luther's family background and childhood, on the social status of his parents, as well as on his immediate living environment and the high living standard in his Wittenberg home. Taken together, these conditions reflect his social status as a respected professor of theology, protagonist of the Reformation, and member of the highest social class in Wittenberg. The last section of this study gives an insight into some selected results of further excavations that have been carried out throughout Wittenberg during the last few years. They make it possible to contextualize not only Luther's household but also the consequences of the Reformation within early modern Wittenberg.

The mission of Myron C. Taylor, personal representative of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to Pope Pius XII, remains a strange anomaly in the history of the foreign relations of the United States. Ever since 1867, when an act of Congress terminated diplomatic relations between the republic and the world's oldest diplomatic entity, the United States had been unrepresented at the Vatican City. The short-lived attempt to reconstitute some form of permanent and effective diplomatic presence was born in controversy and lasted only from 1940 to 1950 during the incumbency of the single appointee. When on Taylor's resignation President Truman attempted to appoint a popular second world war general to the post, the outcry in the United States was so heated that the nomination had to be withdrawn and the venture abandoned. What went wrong? Was the storm of protest merely a result of religious bigotry on the part of American Protestantism? Or had Taylor's conduct of his mission been such as to evoke these outraged feelings? Certain episodes of the diplomatic negotiations between the United States and the Vatican have already been published, for example, the polite exchange of courtesies collected and introduced by Taylor himself, Wartime Correspondence between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII. Some more controversial matters, such as the question of the advisability of bombing Rome, were outlined from the American point of view in the Foreign Relations of the United States. Not until the Vatican's recent decision to publish some of its papers from the pontificate of Pius XII, or more particularly until the opening of Taylor's own papers in 1973, has it been possible to study in more detail the curious entanglement of theological, diplomatic and political considerations which governed the United States' relations with the Vatican, and encompassed Taylor's mission from beginning to end.

An analysis of Lyman Stewart, California oilman and patron of early American fundamentalism, reveals much about the mutual transformations of American religion and capitalism in the early twentieth century. As an expositor of Victorian moralism and California Progressivism, as a missionary for dispensational fundamentalism, and a leader in industrial extraction, Stewart applied the logics of supernatural religion to his oil speculation and the logics of industrial capitalism to his religious work. As one of the chief architects of twentieth-century fundamentalist aspirations, Stewart pursued dueling objectives. On the one hand, he fought for empire and cultural custodianship; on the other hand, he argued for purity and cultural separatism. It was not theological or ecclesiological beliefs that produced this dual aim, but the commodification of religious work. As oil became transmuted into religious capital, religious work—particularly pastorates, missionary work, and theological education—became commodities that could be bought and sold, regulated, and appraised in terms of both purity and production.

Stephen Riggs, Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Indians, anxiously awaited a letter from the American Tract Society. He expected a reply about his proposed account of the recent war between the Dakotas and Euro-American settlers in Minnesota. After more than two centuries of contact between Dakotas and Europeans, and later Americans, relations had broken down entirely. Confined to reservations with some of their people starving, disgruntled Dakota warriors attacked villages and outlying cabins across southern Minnesota. Over several weeks in August and September 1862, they killed at least five hundred settlers and depopulated as many as twenty-three counties. The Reverend Riggs and his family barely escaped. Like so many Minnesota settlers, their home and possessions were destroyed. Military reinforcements eventually stopped the Dakotas' progress, compelling some to surrender and others to escape west to the plains. When hostilities ended, Riggs served as an interpreter in the negotiations over captives and at military tribunals organized to deal with detained Dakota fighters. He later visited Dakotas incarcerated in prison camps, paying special attention to the more than three hundred men sentenced to death for their part in the uprising. In light of his dramatic experience, Riggs proposed an account of his family's escape, along with details of the Dakota warriors' capture and confinement, in order to share how God had worked through this “mighty upheaval.”

Two of the most famous Catholic histories written during the early modern period were the Annales ecclesiastici of Caesar Baronius (d. 1607), a year-by-year chronicle of the Catholic Church from the birth of Christ to the twelfth century, and the Istoria del concilio tridentino of Paolo Sarpi (d. 1623), a scathing critique of the Council of Trent that argued the famous council had only made religious problems worse. Rather than comparing either of these works with similar histories written by protestants—thereby investigating inter-confessional Reformation debates—this article sets Baronius's Annales and Sarpi's Istoria side by side to explore disputes within Catholicism itself. By analyzing how the authors examine four topics in their histories (Peter and the papal primacy, the relationship between the local and universal church, the history of ecumenical councils, and the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities), as well as considering both historians' actions during the Venetian interdict crisis of 1606, this essay argues that Sarpi and Baronius fundamentally disagreed about the origins and exercise of both secular and ecclesiastical authority. These two modes of Catholic history-writing reveal how Sarpi and Baronius drew from contemporary political models, such that “ecclesiastical history” could have significant political ramifications.

Our freer, but yet far from freed, land is the asylum, if asylum there be, for the hope of man; and, there, if anywhere, is the second Eden to be planted in which the divine seed is to bruise the head of Evil and restore Man to his rightful communion with God in the Paradise of Good.

On 20 May 1939 General Francisco Franco attended the solemn Te Deum service held at the royal church of Santa Barbara to celebrate the triumph of nationalist over republican Spain. Surrounded by the symbols of Spain's Catholic past, including the standard used by Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto, the general presented his “sword of victory” to Cardinal Gomá, archbishop of Toledo and primate of the Spanish church.1 The ceremony symbolized the close ties between church and state formed by three years of civil war. The new regime had given proof of its commitment to the church even before the conflict had ended, and the clergy now looked forward to the implementation of a full range of measures in education, culture, and the regulation of public morality, measures that had last been seen in Spain over a century before.2

That feminine metaphors dominate Bernard of Clairvaux's treatment of the contemplative soul who as loving Bride marries Christ in prayerful ecstasy, and as Mother nurtures the world in active service, is indisputable. And much has been made in recent years of the significance of a medieval male “assuming” the role of the female, both in relation to society at large and in relation to God. These latter arguments might be summarized by the claims that the appropriation of feminine images to the medieval male self is frequently either a conscious play on cultural stereotypes to signal spiritual renunciation or the rejection of worldly values, or reflects a need, whether conscious or unconscious, for psychological integration of the feminine and masculine in the lives of those confined to a homo-social world. In Bernard's Bride, then, we discover either the male appropriation of feminine weakness as a sign of spiritual strength or the rational male appropriation of the counterbalancing feminine virtue of affective love. What has not been recognized, however, is the possibility that the figure of the Bride in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs might function paradoxically as a “virile woman,” a female “figure” or type who serves appropriately to represent the highest spiritual attainments of the human soul (whether of biological male or female), precisely because she has overcome any stereotypically “womanly” weaknesses and become typologically “male” or “virile.” Our interpretation of this seminal figure must thus not only take into account the confluence of masculine and feminine in her nature in ways we have not previously suspected. We must also consider the paradoxical reality that this figure may simultaneously represent a soul who is virtuous for having renounced male privilege and become a weak woman and a soul who is valorized for having overcome feminine weakness and become virile. It is this thesis that I will argue in what follows.

High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an “ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east.… The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb.” In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500.

Francis of Assisi's reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is widely held to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the wounds of Christ. The appearance of this miracle, however, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—“I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body”—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since the early Middle Ages. These works posited that clerics bore metaphorical and sometimes physical wounds (stigmata) as marks of persecution, while spreading the teaching of Christ in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, the meaning of Galatians 6:17 had been appropriated by bishops and priests as a sign or mark of Christ that they received invisibly at their ordination, and sometimes visibly upon their death. In the eleventh century, Peter Damian articulated a stigmatic spirituality that saw the ideal priest, monk, and nun as bearers of Christ's wounds, a status achieved through the swearing of vows and the practice of severe penance. By the early twelfth century, crusaders were said to bear the marks of the Passion in death and even sometimes as they entered into battle. By the early thirteenth century, “bearing the stigmata” was a pious superlative appropriated by a few devout members of the laity who interpreted Galatian 6:17 in a most literal manner. Thus, this article considers how the conception of “bearing the stigmata” developed in medieval Europe from its treatment in early Latin patristic commentaries to its visceral portrayal by the laity in the thirteenth century.

Discussion of mission in east Roman or Byzantine history has typically focused on imperial ambitions, royal conversions, and a “top-down” approach to Christianization. The Christian emperor, the earthly image of the heavenly king, had been called by God to propagate the faith and civilize the barbarians. Toward this end he sent out emissaries to foreign potentates, and the conversion of the ruler was soon followed by the Christianization of his people. Such narratives largely ignore missionaries “from below,” deemed “accidental” evangelists, and focus instead on imperially sponsored or “professional missionaries.” Several recent studies have added nuance to the traditional picture by devoting increased attention to mission from below or presenting Christianization as a process comprising multiple stages that spanned several centuries. Building on my own previous article on this theme, the present essay will reexamine narratives of unofficial mission on the eastern frontiers, in particular accounts of captive women credited with converting whole kingdoms to the Christian faith. In each case a female ascetic has either been taken prisoner or has lived for some time as a captive in a foreign land just beyond east Roman borders. The woman's steadfast adherence to her pious way of life, performance of apostolic signs, and verbal testimony to faith in Christ move the ruler and his people to accept the Christian God.

The flowering of foreign missions in nineteenth-century America owed so much to evangelical Protestantism in Europe, that historians looking for uniquely American features in missionary enterprises have had very little to go on. Historians who have attempted to identify the uniqueness of American missions have generally seized upon the links between the missionary spirit and ideas of manifest destiny. Ralph Gabriel taught a generation of historians to see American missions as one aspect of a “mission of America” with ramifications that went far beyond preaching to the heathen. Perry Miller traced the roots of the mission of America to the Plymouth Colony itself and rewrote the history of American development in terms of an “perrand into the wilderness.” Nineteenth-century foreign missions were for Miller the most typical expression of national self-consciousness.

Forty years ago George Every called the attention of the scholarly world to the likelihood that in the oriental patriarchates after the time of John of Damascus the Arabic language increasingly became the language of the Melkite, or Roman (rūmī), community of Christians in the caliphate. They came to use Arabic, Every suggested, not only for scholarly purposes, but even for the divine liturgy, at least for the Scripture lessons.1 In the years since Every made these observations it has become increasingly clear that not only was there such an increase in the use of Arabic in the church during the first Abbasid century, but that the crescendo in the use of Arabic went hand in hand with the diminishment of Greek as a language of church scholarship in the monasteries of the Holy Land from early Abbasid times, perhaps even until the Ottoman period, when the so-called “Rūm Millet” reintroduced the control of Greek speakers in the Jerusalem patriarchate.2 Accordingly, one might speak of the first flowering of Christian life in Arabic in the Holy Land as having occurred during the three centuries stretching from 750, the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, to around the year 1050, the eve of the crusader period in Near Eastern history.3 And the documentary evidence for the literary activity of the Holy Land monks who wrote in Arabic during this period is largely the archive of “old south Palestinian texts” which Joshua Blau studied for his Grammar of Chrtstian Arabic.4

Gregor Heimburg, the bitter critic of the papacy and of Nicholas of Cusa, is said to have taunted Cusanus, saying that because Cusanus was defeated in a lawsuit in Mainz, he turned from the practice of law to theology.1 Heimburg, a utriusque iuris doctor who rendered his legal services to both secular and ecclesiastical princes, was certainly versed in the legal literature of his time. But, as we shall see below, history does not seem to bear out his insinuation that disappointment and failure in the field of law led Cusanus to take up theology as his career. It is probably of little importance to ask whether Cusanus would have continued to work as a lawyer had he won the case in Mainz. We must note, however, that Cusanus is so well known as a theologian, cardinal, philosopher, and even as a scientist that we are apt to forget his early career as a canon lawyer in the service of the archdiocese of Trier. It is only recently that due attention began to be paid to the legal activities of Cusanus.2 The purpose of this paper is to throw light not only on his education and activities as a canon lawyer, but also on the role which he played in the disputed episcopal election of 1430 in the archdiocese of Trier.

A revolution in rural life since the 1940s has produced agribusiness, corporate farms, and situation in which less than five percent of Americans are engaged in farming activities and fewer still work family farms. Richard Hofstadter once observed, “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.” Today, when few vestiges remain of “the localistic and personalistic frame of reference, which describes farming and country life effectively all the way through the depression years,” it is important to remember the influence that an idealized picture of rural life had on earlier generations of American intellectuals. Amidst the profound changes in American society produced by industrialization, urbanization, and corporate capitalism, many thinkers adhered to a vision of simpler times—one of grass-— Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), p. 23. John L.—Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), p. xvi; Shover's book is a poignant analysis of the revolution in rural life since the 1940s. Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J., 1970), examines the nostalgia for simpler times in the thought of nine people, including John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Jane Addams, Josiah Royce, and Robert E. Park, who identified personally and professionally with urban life.

In Milton's description of the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, the entire Garden of Eden is seen to participate in the celebration of their union. Spousal and nature imagery are woven together, beauty and desire joined in the mystery of Adam's amazement at this gift of his “other self” newly received from God's hand. Says Adam of his wife,

To the nuptial bower

I led her blushing like the morn: all heaven,

And happy constellations on that hour

Shed their selectest influence; the earth

Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;

Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs

Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings

Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub,

Disporting, till the amorous bird of night

Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening star

On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.

Joyous birds, whispering breezes, welcoming stars—they all share in the couple's holy delight in each other and in God.

Early in his career, when he still trusted in the power of councils to effect reform, Martin Luther wrote: [The Romanists] are not empowered to prohibit a council or, according to their pleasure, to determine its decisions in advance, to bind it and to rob it of freedom. But if they do so, I hope to have shown that of a truth they belong to the community of Antichrist and the devil.” Some seventy years before Luther's appeal to the German nobility, however, the Spanish theologian and noted conciliarist, Juan de Segovia, who championed the authority of councils throughout his career, had already drawn a more startling connection between the chief “Romanist” opponent of councils and the spiritual adversaries of Christendom. For, in several works written in the 1450s, Segovia identified Pope Eugenius IV with Lucifer.

Recently, attention has been given to understanding the status of woman in early Christianity. As expected, the light has been focused on Saint Paul, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, but so far, no one has examined one of the most fascinating movements of the second century—Montanism. Perhaps this is because Tertullian is remembered as both a Montanist and a notorious misogynist. Given the boldness and originality of Tertullian's thought, however, it would be perilous to assume that Tertullian's view of women was identical to that originally held by the Montanists of Asia Minor. Indeed, as this study of Montanism in Asia Minor will show, it is highly probable that from the beginnings of Montanism, women were permitted to rise to ministerial status through their role as confessor-martyrs in the early Christian church.