Our fellow historian Peter Brown reports that according to a memoir written, sometime around 1900 by a contemporary of Benedetto Croce, the eminent Italian philosopher, Croce challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysics. What a startling report that makes you eager to turn the page—as in a John Gresham volume—in order to find out what happened. But nothing more is said in the book, compelling the conclusion that for the author, this was routine, unimportant, and even normal for professors to challenge each other to deadly duels. He must have thought that no explanation was necessary. And so a single sentence stands alone, tantalizing, unexplained—for contemporaries commonplace; for posterity altogether startling. What a splendid introduction to how to see the past offered us by Peter Brown!

“The Catholic Worker movement is evolving in ways its founders didn't anticipate,” declared a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, explaining that the movement has evolved from a community of single people to a network that includes many family-centered houses of hospitality. Such media perceptions are widely shared by Catholic Worker families. “In 1933,” explained Julia Occhiogrosso of the Las Vegas Catholic Worker, “Dorothy [Day] didn't give us models for families who want to minister to the poor, Catholic Worker style.” These claims demand a more sustained historical analysis. Just how new are Catholic Worker families? What historical factors contributed to their emergence? Who did create the models for the dozens of families that today are feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoners, and bending swords into plowshares?

Christian monasticism in the East has three sources: the original rule of the founder or that of a reformer, laws issued by the Roman emperors, and the canons of church councils. The purpose of this article is to study the latter two, which have received little attention in the scholarly work on monastic life. The close association between church and state, unique to the East, made it incumbent upon the leaders of both the secular and religious hierarchies of Byzantium to oversee the development of monasticism from the fourth to the eighth century. Those 400 years mark the first and normative period of legislation dealing with the monastic life.

The libelous depiction of King Chilperic I (561–584) and his wife Fredegund in Gregory of Tours' Decem Libri Historiarum has encouraged the false impression of these Merovingian monarchs as scourges of the Gallo-Frankish Church and its bishops. If fact, evidence from Gregory's own writings, as well as from other contemporary sources, reveals that Chilperic and Fredegund were generous patrons of ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and cults. A prosopographical database of seventeen episcopal supporters of Chilperic and Fredegund is used to evaluate the means by which the royal couple attracted and maintained episcopal support. The patronage by the royal couple of saint cults and their associated institutions also is examined. It is concluded that Chilperic and Fredegund's ecclesiastical policies are less responsible for their posthumous reputations than the choices that they made in distributing their patronage.

The Great Awakening of 1740–41, which set for a century and a half the basic patterns of American revivalist religion, was itself shaped by earlier outpourings of the Spirit. The most influential of these was undoubtedly the revival of 1734–35 in Jonathan Edwards' congregation at Northampton, a revival which spread widely in western Massachusetts and even south into Connecticut. Edwards' preaching methods were copied and his congregation's conversion experiences emulated not only in the immediate revival but, through Edwards' Faithful Narrative of them, in the Whitefield and subsequent awakenings. The Northampton awakening had been in process of preparation for two or three years under Edwards' preaching. But its first overt manifestation coincided with Edwards' two lectures on justification by faith alone, sermons preached avowedly against Arminianism and in spite of the warnings and censure of some of his influential kinsmen.

Many forces, ancient and modern, European and Asiatic, political and economic, have combined to produce the present state of unrest and political turmoil in Indonesia, otherwise known as the Dutch East Indies. No one can fully understand the present situation with all its emotional tensions, unless he appreciates the various religious factors which are operative, to a greater or less degree, in the Indonesian nationalist movement.

Many students of John Wesley have examined his economic ideas;2 few have appreciated their range. At least three sources molded the economic thought of the founder of Methodism. Only one of them, the Christian ethical tradition, has been studied with sufficient care. It was, to be sure, the first and most prominent source. But it was followed, first by Wesley's reaction to certain acute social problems which forced themselves on his attention during the 1770's, then by the thought of one of the most prominent economists of that day, the Rev. Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester. These later stimuli led Wesley to consider a problem which disturbed many of his contemporaries, the problem of the extent to which a government should be allowed to control commerce and industry. His thinking on this problem is important, not because of its sophistication, but because of the tremendous influence Wesley exerted on public opinion, through his uncommonly effective preaching, organizing, and writing.3

In the spring of 1831, Methodist minister John Price Durbin delivered an evangelical sermon that assumed his listeners were familiar with the basic rules of science. “Are planetary worlds seen revolving in their orbits harmoniously and steadily?” he asked his rural Kentucky audience. “Is a little microscopic insect seen in the dust, or in the down of a peach, or in a drop of water?” The answer, of course, was yes—though Durbin saw no need to say so. His questions were merely rhetorical; the Methodists listening to his sermon knew, after all, that planetary worlds and microscopic insects existed, even if not all of them had had the opportunity to see these natural phenomena firsthand. Scientists had proved that the phenomena existed, and in 1831, the authority of science was to be trusted.

About 1594 a young English poet, then in his twenty-first year, composed a satire on religion, described by Professor Grierson as “one of the earliest and most thoughtful appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious differences, which was written perhaps in any country.” The satire directs its jibes at all men who choose their religion uncritically—whether they blindly turn to Rome or to the Church of England, whether to Geneva, to Atheism, or to religious relativism. The author advises, instead, a diligent searching out of the “right” and the “best” religion. The task, as he pictures it, is a difficult business, demanding of us that we inquire patiently and “doubt wisely”; for the Truth stands at the top of a steep and craggy hill, and only by a most careful circling of that hill can we reach the summit.

Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were strikingly different. Before removal, Cherokee printers emulated Anglo-Protestant prototypes in terms of dimensions, layout, and typography. The goal was to increase the likelihood of staying on their lands by winning white patrons and nudging Cherokee readers to see themselves as acculturated reading subjects. After removal, Cherokee printers rethought acculturation as a strategy. They redesigned Poor Sarah to turn away from white audiences and instead address the Cherokee community and its needs. Attention to the evolving materialities of Poor Sarah reveals Cherokee Christian printing as a key site of Indigenous media theory and part of Cherokee Nation's repertory of political action in response to US imperialism and settler colonialism.

The Carolingian period, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries, was dynamic and decisive in European religious history. The ruling dynasty and the clerical elite promoted wave after wave of reform that I call “unifying,” “specifying,” and “sanctifying.” This presidential address argues that religion was the key unifying and universalizing force in the Carolingian world; that the Carolingians were obsessed with doing things the right way—usually the Roman way; and that the Carolingians sought to inculcate Christian behavior more than religious knowledge. The address concludes by arguing that the Carolingians put a markedly European stamp on Christianity and that they Romanized Christianity well before the papacy attempted to do so.

Anger was a topic of significant reflection in antiquity, and it was taken up in new ways in early Christianity. As contemporary historians explore the myriad ways in which emotions were not only described but also presented, scripted, and made normative in historical sources, greater clarity is needed to understand the ways in which institutions were involved in shaping emotions. This essay argues that Augustine of Hippo's catechetical instruction on the Lord's Prayer constituted a critical institution for the transposition of classical discourses on anger and its healing into Christian education. Augustine understood the catechumenate itself as an institution for teaching patience and forbearance as antidotes to anger, and in these settings, he provided a variety of cognitive and spiritual exercises for diagnosing and treating anger. By articulating baptismal education as an emotion-shaping institution, we can better appreciate the ways in which Christian communities developed and expanded the inherited institutions of antiquity for ordering the emotions. In addition, such reflection allows us to evaluate the subtle interplays between emotions as felt subjective experiences and as reflective of social organizations that instilled and prescribed emotional norms.

The stark antithesis between the secular and the religious has been effectively challenged by scholarship of early modern Italy, which has shown the degree to which these fields necessarily overlapped. Nevertheless, studies of early modern female devotion, especially within convents, often present women as caught between competing claims of kinship and clerical authority, a conflict between family and convent, an opposition between the secular and the divine. This paper argues that within Neapolitan conventual circles, at least, nuns' noble blood was regarded as enhancing the spiritual value of their convents, and that, on the whole, the way in which the Decrees of the Council of Trent were interpreted served to “aristocratize” convents. Something of a fusion occurred between nobility and spirituality in women. This paper relates this fusion to discourses on nobility and to the aristocratization of convent culture after enclosure at Trent, examining how it marked post-Tridentine Neapolitan convent architecture and urbanism. In short, I argue that nuns' nobility enhanced the spiritual value of Neapolitan convents after Trent, and that such status was communicated discursively, architecturally, and urbanistically.

In the two decades from 1590 to 1610, there were three major events in the life of the Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands. In theology there was the outbreak of the so-called Arminian controversy over predestination and related issues, culminating in the polarizing of the Dutch Reformed Church into Remonstrant and Contra-remonstrant parties. In economics there was the transition from late-medieval and intra-European trade patterns to the new global and colonial patterns of the Dutch East India Company. In politics there was the signing of a truce with Spain, with the unprecedented granting of independence to a new nation by a great power.