Celio Calcagnini's active career falls in a period marked by many men of note and by a number of significant events. He touched some of these directly or indirectly. He was involved in an imperial and in a papal war, in an imperial election, in the controversy stirred up by Luther, in the divorce question precipitated by Henry VIII. He fanned into flame the conflict over the imitation of Cicero. He took an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Independently of Copernicus, Calcagnini made a curious and not altogether ridiculous contribution toward creating an attitude of mind favorable to the new conception of the solar system for which Copernicus was to become famous. He was personally acquainted with the painter Raphael, with Jovius, with Manardi the physician, with Ziegler, the poet Ariosto, the humanist Erasmus. In his home-town of Ferrara he enjoyed a place of honor as university professor, as apostolic prothonotary, as an excellent dinner host. He was considered to be one of the most learned men of Italy. Yet his importance was always that of a bridesmaid rather than of a bride. It has its uses, however, to look at a wedding from a bridesmaid's angle. To see an era reflected in the career of a minor actor may prove rewarding.

The names of George Fox, William Penn, and Margaret Fell occupy a premier place among the leaders of seventeenth-century English Quakerism. George Fox, Quaker tradition has claimed, was the prophetic and preeminent first-generation leader from 1652 until his death in 1691. William Penn's chief claim to historical fame was his founding of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, as well as his prolific writings in defense of Quakerism and religious toleration in England. Margaret Fell, who married Fox in 1669, has been epitomized most frequently as the “Mother of Quakerism,” a hagiographic title that leaves her role imprecisely defined. Margaret Fell's position was a powerful one in the organization of nascent Quakerism. She came under Fox's influence while Judge Fell, her first husband, was still living. At first a novitiate under Fox's spiritual guidance, she soon became an apt apologist and grass-roots organizer who equaled and in most cases exceeded other leaders in edifying, guiding, and sustaining the Quaker cause. Although Fell, Fox, and Penn were long-term friends despite a wide age difference, Fell's real-life role in this triumvirate of early Quaker leadership largely has been lost in the obscurity and myth of Quaker beginnings.

The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a number of trends in the American Catholic religious scene with special reference to new immigrants:

(a) The immigrants developed a cohesion and identity based on language that tended to obscure provincial loyalties and to transcend village patriotism.

(b) This new sense of identity, a product of nationalist ideology and the influence of the American experience, received its primary expression in the ethnic church. This institution, founded primarily on linguistic lines, encompassed those who spoke the same tongue and resided within the same ghetto or patch.

Four hundred years have passed since the bells rang out in Germany to announce the Peace of Augsburg. Each century since, historians have piously performed their antiquarian rites in its honor. It was, to be sure, the most important Diet between that of Worms in 1521, when Luther stood alone, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War which involved many nations. The oratorical monuments erected faithfully on these centennials have generally emphasized the great gain of Protestantism in legal recognition, the assurance, by God's grace, of the freedom of the church, and the honest good of peaceful coexistence. But a sober analysis produces an effect rather more astringent than exhilarating and medicinal than intoxicating.

The defenders of John Calvin have sought to excuse his share in the execution of Servetus by resorting to the type of apologetic employed by Catholics in defense of the Inquisition. The victims, we are told, were politically and socially subversive and would have been suppressed in any age. In the case of Servetus this charge cannot be substantiated from his writings, since he did not reject the oath, nor the authority of the magistrate, neither did he counsel immorality. The only recourse for the apologists is to connect Servetus with Calvin's political opponents, the so-called Libertines. The argument has assumed slightly different forms in different hands, but three main contentions emerge: 1) that Servetus plotted with the Libertines for the overthrow of Calvin's régime; 2) that the Libertines endeavored to bring about the acquittal of Servetus; and 3) that they communicated with him to that end during the course of his trial.

When Christian missionaries returned to the Congo in the nineteenth century, all traces of the promising Portuguese missionary effort of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had been obliterated. The Kingdom of the Congo which had produced several generations of Christian Kings, thousands of converts, even an African clergy and an African Bishop, had been literally swept away by the European slave trade. The Church had paid a heavy price for its failure to restrain the greed of the faithful, and one would scarcely expect to find the error repeated. Furthermore, the intervening centuries had produced in Europe a growth of humanitarian sentiment which had sensitized the Christian conscience to the suffering of the oppressed; indeed this concern for the temporal welfare of the African had been an important factor in the outburst of nineteenth century missionary activity. Yet when this second encounter of European and African produced in the Congo Free State a form of exploitation which rivalled the first in its brutality, dedicated Catholic missionaries and zealous Catholic prelates staunchly defended the regime against the attacks of reformers. The explanation of this melancholy episode appears to lie in the fact that sectarian interest, national loyalty, and an overwhelming faith in the benefits of Europeanization were allowed to obscure the essential facts.

William Ockham's interests were turned to political philosophy by the circumstances of his life. As early as 1323, he became entangled in the controversy of his order on evangelical poverty with the pope, John XXII, who by his bull, Ad conditorem canonum, issued on December 8, 1322, withdrew from the Franciscans the right of holding property in the name of the Holy See, granted to them by Innocent IV in 1245, and by Nicholas III in 1279. The case seems trifling, yet it involved the interpretation of the life of Christ himself, whom the sons of St. Francis tried to imitate by substituting the use of property for its ownership. The “Spirituals” stood for the original views of the order and considered the papal bull as dragging them down to worldliness and abasement. Ockham in a sermon delivered at Bologna attacked the pope's conception of apostolical poverty. John XXII, in a bull dated December 1, 1323, and addressed to the bishops of Ferrara and Bologna, ordered his arrest and held him in Avignon for four years for trial. In August, 1325, a commission of six theologians, one of whom was Durandus de St. Porciano, at that time bishop of Meaux, was appointed to investigate his theological and philosophical doctrines. In 1326 the commission declared fifty-one articles taken from his Commentary to the Sentences as heretical. On April 13, 1328, Ockham signed the protest of the general of the Franciscan order, Michael Cesena, also under arrest, against the papal bull of 1322, which condemned the tenet of evangelical poverty. The night of May 24, 1328, brought a dramatic turn in his life. He succeeded in escaping from the papal prison in the company of Cesena and Bonagratia of Bergamo, the famous civil and canon lawyer, and fled to Pisa to seek the protection of Louis of Bavaria, emperor of Germany and archenemy of the pope.

With no other country save possibly Italy has the Roman Catholic Church been more closely linked than with Spain. To think Spain was to think Roman Catholicism. Ferdinand and Isabella whom the world remembers best in relation to the discovery of the western world were known as the Catholic kings and their oft expressed motive in the conquest of the new continent was that of extending the holy faith. Mohammedanism with its resistless armies had made heavy inroads upon the Christian world; Luther and his fellow reformers in Germany, France, and Switzerland had wrought still further havoc, separating vast numbers of the faithful from their allegiance to Rome. To Spain and the Spanish monarchs was to belong the glory of restoring, by their zealous conversion of the western peoples, the power and prestige of Rome. In a few short years Spanish conquerors followed by Spanish priests and nuns had planted the cross from Mexico to the southern end of South America.

The period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth marked a turning point in the development of the English people. With the insight that comes from historical perspective, we can see that the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the accession of a new dynasty in 1714, the American Revolution of 1776, and even the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, were to a considerable degree influenced by the significant events of the period 1640–1660.

It is part of our American folk-lore that sooner or later a criminal will return to the scene of his crime. And perhaps it is a bad conscience which brings me to this topic. Nonetheless, if indeed this paper be an exercise in the amendment of life, I take comfort in the fact that a confession of sin is hardly a profession of achievement. Consequently, if at the close of this paper I leave this topic no better than I found it, the effort will yet have been a phase in my amendment of life. I do not think that any of us will come easily or quickly to an adequate understanding of how greatly we all must change our ways. Nor will the change itself be accomplished by mere good intentions.

The creation of new saints often has a political edge; the Catholic Church molds saints’ lives to fit its needs, and individual popes have particular priorities in saint-making. In the early modern Church, this was particularly important after the Council of Trent. The Tridentine decrees (1563) instructed bishops to reform the Church but provided few practical suggestions for how to do this. One solution was to hold up exemplary post-Tridentine bishops as models through beatification and canonization. Historians have noted the importance of model bishops but have not fully considered the process of creating them and its implication for the histories of Catholic Reform and of canonization. The case of Cardinal-Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo of Padua (bp. 1664–1697) tells a complicated and interesting story about the intersection of Catholic Reform and canonization. Barbarigo was beatified in 1761 during the Catholic Enlightenment and was finally canonized in 1960, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Examining the construction of his image from 1699–1960, this article argues that the Catholic Church in both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries molded Barbarigo into the model bishop needed at those particular times, in response to the issues facing contemporary bishops and clergy.

In the spring of 1868, sixty-eight students gathered to become the first matriculants of the Illinois Industrial University. They had responded to a summons by the state legislature to engage in a bold new mission of publicly funded mechanical and industrial education, a move which would, Illinoisans hoped, bring lavish prosperity to their fellow citizens and themselves. Like other colleges of the period, utilitarian and democratic rationales motivated the I. I. U. leadership to establish their school. Quoting their commission by the Morrill Act, the trustees said the university's “chief aim” was to educate “the industrial classes” by teaching “such branches of learning as are related to Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, and Military Tactics, without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” And yet, there was an even more radical and compelling vision among the I.I.U. faithful, one which was distinctively theological: “The hope of the Trustees and Faculty,” they said, “is that the Institution will produce … men of Christian culture … able and willing to lend a helping hand in all the great practical enterprises of this most practical age.”

“I hope that the matter of the agreement not to discuss the war can be satisfactorily clarified,” Walter M. Horton wrote to the office of the Federal Council of Churches in November of 1941, referring to a meeting of several hundred liberal Protestant leaders the FCC was planning for the following March. “I found some questioning about it” at a recent meeting of peace advocates, some of whom, Horton continued, expressed fear that if they went to the conference they would be obliged “to swear an oath not to say a word about the dominant reality on the horizon.” The distinguished Oberlin theologian worried that the question of “a just and durable peace” that was to be addressed at the “Delaware Conference”—so named on account of its being held on the Delaware, Ohio, campus of Ohio Wesleyan University—might not be effectively engaged because opponents of American entry into World War II were being asked to shut up in the presence of the self-styled “political realists” who were chiefly behind the conclave.

In the early modern period, Basque women who could not or did not want to follow the traditional paths of monasticism or secular marriage had a third option. They could become seroras, or celibate laywomen licensed by the diocese and entrusted with caring for a shrine or parish church. Seroras enjoyed significant social prestige and their work was competitively remunerated by the local community; yet despite their central place in the local religious life of the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, the seroras have attracted almost no historical study. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it summarizes the social and spiritual context that allowed for women to experiment with the more unorthodox religious vocations like that of the seroras; and secondly, it draws from extensive primary documentation concerning the seroras in order to outline the main features of the vocation, by extension differentiating them from better-known categories of the semi-religious life such as the beguines, Castilian beatas, or Italian tertiaries.

In 351 c.e., Cyril of Jerusalem prepared catechumens for baptism at what he identified as the very center of the world. From Golgotha Christ once stretched his hands to embrace the ends of the earth, and Cyril's catechumens would soon receive a distinctive baptism predicated on their proximity to Golgotha first and Christ's tomb second. For this bishop location was truly everything, in his own words: “For others only hear but we both see and handle.” Cyril's Lenten Catechumenate consisted of an eight-week course of prebaptismal preparation culminating in an Easter baptism. Within this institution Cyril offered a privileged course of Christian inculcation and a singular notion of the “Christian Soldier.” Through a highly visual exegesis of the crucifixion and resurrection, Cyril transformed baptizands into witnesses to these two events, a status obligating them to defend the actuality of these moments and, in so doing, promote Cyril's particular conceptualization of Jerusalem as Holy Land.

Though a Catholic country, Italy has been distinguished by the presence of a deeply-rooted Socialist Party. At the beginning of the twentieth century, encouraged by the economic and social changes taking place as well as by a new and growing awareness, a number of Catholics decided to open up to a dialogue with the socialist world. Some, such as Don Murri, identified Turati's party as a possible political interlocutor, in the conviction that the programmes of the democratic Catholics and those of the left had many elements in common. Others sensitive to modernist issues, particularly in intellectual circles, believed that Christianity at its origins and the early forms of socialism shared the same basic identity. Thus some scholars (including Father Ernesto Buonaiuti) chose to focus on the origins of the church, convinced that examples could be found there of how the world could be changed according to Christian ethics. The response of left-wing culture to these ideas was varied. Some, such as Camillo Prampolini, an exponent of “evangelical socialism,” appeared to be interested in a dialogue, like those socialists who were ready to accept idealist inspiration. The party leadership, instead, barred any suggestion of debate, convinced that Marxism was an alternative to Christianity.

This essay surveys the ways the attitudes of Piccolomini and Cusa toward the initiation of a crusade were shaped by their shifting allegiances between 1432 and their deaths in 1464. Piccolomini's developing interest in crusade, which became his central concern during his reign as pope, is traced through his years at Basel and in the service of Frederick III. Cusa's attitude toward crusade is approached in terms of the apparent contradiction between the views set out in his De pace fidei and the role that he played at imperial diets in the 1440s and 1450s. In the case of both men, the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is reassessed.

This article investigates the religious practice of suffering for others in the early Middle Ages. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. This practice was based on the idea that one person could stand in for another to bear his burden. Using penitential, conciliar, liturgical, and epistolary sources, I uncover two types of proxy penance. First, priests shared in the penance of those who confessed to them. Liturgical texts include Masses in which the priest completes the penance for someone who could not complete it himself. Penitential texts admonish the priest to “share in the foulness” with the sinner in order to bring about the remission of his sin. Second, there was both a promotion and a criticism of proxy fasting among the laity. This sic et non rhythm shows that early medieval penitential culture could not control the demand for proxy penance. Some attention is also paid to the practice of proxy penance in the eleventh-century monastic milieu of Peter Damian. This article broadens the scope of current scholarship on penance by focusing on its substitutionary ability. Also, this article explores the changing notions of and metaphors about sin in this period—from medical to economic—that fueled proxy activity.