Georgia in the revolutionary period, not unlike many other provinces along the American seaboard, lacked social solidarity and unity. The lack was not the result of great ethnic diversity alone or of the disharmony arising from economic inequalities and political disagreement. To racial variety and divergences attributable to economic and political conditions were added many differences in customs and modes of living and in traditional thought which could be ascribed, in part at least, to the numerous religious sects attracted to the province by the liberal provisions of its charter. The religious conflicts of the period are best seen in the struggle over the establishment of the Church of England and in the relations of the dissenters with the civil government and with the religious establishment. The question of external ecclesiastical control, issues and grievances of a religious nature which appeared in the revolutionary argument, and the alignment of the sects on the question of open conflict with Great Britain, are interesting and important aspects of the whole religious situation. It is with these phases of the religious history of Georgia during two decades that this study is largely concerned.

This article examines the biography of a twelfth-century English holy woman, the Life of Christina of Markyate—particularly its account of a vision that she had in which she was crowned in the likeness of a bishop's miter—within the context of campaigns undertaken by English monasteries in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to obtain the papal privilege of full exemption from the sacramental and juridical control of their diocesan bishop. Reading Christina's vision in view of the bids for independence made by St. Albans—the community responsible for commissioning and writing her biography—especially helps to shed light on why the Life seems to figure her in a distinctly episcopal cast. Significantly, the Life's account of this vision may have been shaped by a miniature cycle of the passion and miracles of St. Edmund, produced by Bury circa 1125, seemingly in an effort to provide further confirmation of the abbey's exempt status. In a miniature depicting Edmund's apotheosis, the saint divinely receives a miter-like crown, which is nearly identical in its ornamentation to the one that Christina would later receive. Ultimately under investigation in this article is whether St. Albans' campaign for exemption was one of the influences dictating the composition of the Life of Christina.

Faced with suspicion, hostility and repression, yet small in number and dedicated increasingly to peaceful principles, the early Quakers had recourse to the press. They published detailed accounts of their persecutions and a large number of purely theological treatises which are relatively well known. They also published a literature of defense which, although widely cited, has not until now been the subject of systematic study. In these tracts they refuted charges that they were emissaries of Rome and enemies of the established order; justified their refusal to do “hat honor”, to take oaths, to pay tithes and to participate in the rituals of an established church; pleaded for liberty of conscience; threatened their opponents with God's wrath; and encouraged each other to stand fast in adversity. The literature of defense grew rapidly in the decade before the Restoration and declined steadily in the decade or so thereafter.

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

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.

If after many years of scholarship and controversy, the French Revolution is to be seen, with Georges Lefebvre, as preeminently the revolution of equality, and its most important achievement the substitution of a bourgeois and individualistic social order for the former aristocratic and corporatist one, the nature of eighteenth-century corporate or “constituted bodies” becomes a major area for research. There are many questions which the historian would like to ask about these aristocratic institutions, but generally these questions fall into two groups: the relationship of these bodies to society as a whole, and their inner cohesiveness. By examining the taxation of the clergy in eighteenth-century France, we investigate the chief temporal characteristic of the ecclesiastical estate and are in a position to evaluate both its relationship to French society as a whole and its internal strengths and weaknesses.

The news of the accession of Suleiman the Magnificent to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1520 did not seriously alarm contemporary European rulers for he was generally considered to be a weakling completely devoid of initiative. Surprisingly, however, this supposedly weak son of a strong father (Selim I) took the initiative within one year of becoming Sultan. Eager to strengthen the position of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, Suleiman temporarily abandoned his father's policy of conquest in the Middle East and launched a series of powerful attacks against South Eastern Europe: Belgrade fell in 1521 after it had withstood Turkish attacks for over half a century; Rhodes, the main Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, suffered a similar fate the following year. The pressure on Hungary, which was increased after the fall of Belgrade, discouraged the Eastern Europeans from an optimistic view of their future. Indeed, the outlook for Eastern Europe was by no means bright.

“It is not permitted that country bishops should ordain presbyters or deacons, nor, moreover, may city presbyters do so, without the written permission of the bishop in each parish.” This canon, which is still on occasion cited to uphold presbyterian ordination in the early church,1 so bristles with difficulties, that it is perhaps advisable to refrain from using it to prove anything.

It may appear absurd to link a thinker of Christian antiquity with the peoples of early modern North America. The Bishop of Hippo (354–430) was not particularly interested in evangelization beyond the Mediterranean world. While he encouraged the proselytization of the tribes of North Africa, Augustine rejected the possibility of “New Worlds” as “on no grounds credible” for lack of scriptural warrant. His achievement, some thousand years before Columbus, was to provide the authoritative account of religious conversion as well as the intellectual foundations for Christian spirituality. This legacy was not well suited, however, to deal with problems raised by contact with “new” peoples of the Americas. It had little to say about the “nature” of these “savage” peoples as well as the prospects for their conversion. Augustinian theology emphasizes relations between God and self, in contrast to the approach identified with Thomas Aquinas, which asserts the possibility of finding God in the world and propels inquiry in that direction. Augustine's sense of the corruption of fallen humankind and the powerlessness of nature without God would appear to discourage any but the most morbid interest in New World peoples.

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.

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.