In Chaste, Silent and Obedient, Suzanne Hull lists 163 English books written for women (by both sexes) published between 1475 and 1640. Of the eighteen books she classifies as devotional, the second (chronologically) is Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones (1582), an immense book—over 1500 quarto pages—containing prayers and meditations for a variety of occasions, extracts from the Bible, and brief lives of biblical and other model women. Hull has aptly commented that, “In fact, The Monument of Matrones comes close to being an entire female library between two covers.” The iconography of various illustrated pages and some prayers have been analyzed, and some writings by women such as Queen Margaret of Navarre, Queen Katherine Parr, and Lady Jane Dudley, have been anthologized, but the book has not been studied as a whole. Bentley, in his introduction, “To the Christian Reader,” describes the book as a collection of “diuers verie godlie, learned and diuine treatises, of meditationes and praier, made by sundrie right famous Queenes, noble Ladies, vertuous Virgins, and godlie Gentlewomen of al ages” (Bl) which had gone out of print. But is it simply an anthology of standard devotional material? Because it was directed to women, is it an affirmation of egalitarian impulses in Reformation English religious thought? Or does it prescribe the limited range of virtues acceptable to an increasingly patriarchal authority in late sixteenth-century society? It goes without saying that a book as rich and complex as the Monument will contain different, even conflicting, points of view, as the following, necessarily brief, summary will suggest.

In the year 411 the bishops of Christian North Africa, Augustine among them, assembled in Carthage to debate whether Catholics or Donatists should be recognized as the true Christian church in North Africa. Although most biographies of Augustine and histories of Christianity in North Africa mention this conference, they spend little time on the substance of the discussion which took place between the two parties. Accusations by fourthcentury Catholics, especially Augustine, and remarks by modern commentators often charge the Donatists with delaying the debate on the real issues of the Conference by interventions and procedural motions which served no useful purpose. Even W. H. C. Frend in The Donatist Church, and Peter Brown in his biography of Augustine take Catholic propaganda on this issue at face value.

As some recent historians have argued, the phenomenon of “gender,” that is, the way in which a society or group perceives and articulates difference between the sexes, can provide that society or group with fundamental terms in which to understand itself and explain or justify its actions. Consequently, historical evidence of the way groups or societies have perceived and articulated sexual difference—have constructed gender—may therefore take us beyond matters of sexuality per se to wider revelations about the perceivers' sense of themselves1.

It is not easy to edit an issue of a journal without the knowledge or participation of one of the two coeditors. But the editorial assistants, special editor, and I have done just that in the case of Jerald C. Brauer. He turns seventy late this summer, and in the name of the American Society of Church History, its Council, and the editorial advisory council of Church History and its staff, we dedicate this issue to him. Members of the Society and readers of this journal will be glad to hear that the Council asked him to remain in his coediting post and named him to another term.

At the recent meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York I was recollecting with a friend our common experience in a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago. In the course of that conversation we came to realize that the majority of the papers from the seminar eventually had found their way into print, in one form or another. We noted with satisfaction how seeds planted years ago had borne some fruit, but with that curious admixture of emotions that men and women reserve for their academic mentors, we also understood that finally the seminar was another page of testimony to the energetic intellectual leadership of the professor who had conducted it, Jerald C. Brauer.

The most extensive early test of the American dogma of the separation of church and state seems to me to have taken place in pioneer Ohio, where a complete range of the plurality of America's religious associations first confronted public consciousness. Unlike Kentucky, whose many Protestant denominations had a largely southern cast, and unlike upstate New York, whose culture was heavily under New England influence (or, at least, appeared to literate Yankees to be so), Ohio's early citizens came from a wide mix of puritan, mid-Atlantic, and southern backgrounds. For example, every sect of Pennsylvania Germans established major outposts in Ohio's developing counties. The Buckeye State early brought together several concentrations of Roman Catholics. Early and late, diverse communities of Jews also settled there, both in smaller towns as well as in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. Also at the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern Orthodox Christians began a migration to Cleveland that later expanded into the larger industrial towns that grew southward, in such places as Toledo, Canton, and Youngstown.

In medieval German history excommunication, when considered at all, is usually examined from the perspective of the conflicts between empire and papacy, such as that between Pope Gregory VII and King Henry IV. Like the pope, the bishops of the German Empire were armed with the power to excommunicate. Excommunication therefore figured in local, regional politics, especially in the creation of territorial principalities within the German Empire. Territorial principalities formed during the High Middle Ages when the kingship weakened, and various powerful lords, secular and spiritual, began to build states which eventually gained near-autonomous status within the empire. When a secular dynastic lord struggled to expand his dominion over land and people, he often encroached upon church lands. To defend their churches bishops could and often did excommunicate their perceived oppressors. These regional conflicts were complicated by the dual role of prince-bishops: spiritual princes of the church and secular princes of empire. In competition with the lay nobility, prince-bishops were expanding their own secular dominions.

In the study of women and religion, it has long been common to suggest that women were particularly attracted to nontraditional theology, often of a spiritualistic nature. In earlier days, women's heretical inclinations were explained by their weaker minds and their irrational nature which made them susceptible to the influence of demagogues and false preachers. In more recent feminist interpretations, mysticism and sectarianism are seen as providing opportunites to women for religious expression and forms of leadership not open to them in established churches.

Within ten years of the execution of Louis XVI two general and opposed features of the Old Regime, Catholic Christianity and Enlightenment rationality, were globally idealized by two authors—both of them former aristocrats— François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836). No two participants in the complex discussion of religion and secularism that took place at the highest levels of government and Parisian intellectual life at the end of the First Republic and during the Napoleonic regime better represented on the one hand unconditional nostalgia for Catholicism, and on the other uncompromising intellectual pursuit of the secular scientific ideal. Though it has become customary to oppose the Neo-Christian intellectuals Chateaubriand, De Maistre, De Bonald, and Ballanche, to the Idéologues Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Maine de Biran, and others, I believe that this opposition can be clarified if the extremes represented by Chateaubriand and De Tracy are better defined. In other words, a clear definition of the personal metaphysics—thoughts and feelings—of Chateaubriand and De Tracy should establish the polarities of intellectual temperament that characterized the Napoleonic era.

On 16 March 1742, Jonathan Edwards's church in Northampton adopted a new covenant of faith. Written in the heat of the Great Awakening, the document began, predictably, by acknowledging “the blessed manifestations and fruits of [God's] gracious presence in this town” during the recent spiritual revivals. It then plunged into more worldly matters. It called on every church member to deal honestly and justly in secular business: they were not “in any matter” to “overreach or defraud” their “neighbor…and either willfully or through want of care, injure him in any of his honest possessions or rights.” The oath became more explicit. Debtors were to pay their creditors, so to avoid “willfully or negligently” wronging others. Indeed, debtors promised to forego “rest till … that restitution, or …that satisfaction” were effected. Likewise, creditors pledged to eschew “wordly gain, or honor, or interest…or getting the better” of their “competitors” as the “governing aim” of their business. Those who managed public affairs also were to forsake competitiveness. They agreed to relinquish their private interests for the sake of equity, especially “concerning any outward possessions, privileges, rights or properties.” Although the covenant dealt with other matters, it sustained its striking focus on commerce. Even as it neared its conclusion, it used economic metaphor to urge piety, presenting life as capital “to be laboriously spent in the business of religion: ever making it our greatest business.”

Pius IX's categorical rejection of an Italian republic from 1848 to his death in 1878 created a daunting task for American Catholic apologists, who wanted to defend their besieged leader without fueling anti-Catholic nationalism.1 The responses, even from those who had oniy minimally defended the papacy's temporal power prior to 1848, exceeded predictable expressions of sympathy. Pius IX's long suffering became the prism through which a beleaguered American Catholic community viewed the whole spectrum of its own experiences of hope and frustration in securing influence in an often hostile society.

Tertullian understood the apostle Paul to have suggested there would always be heretics (1 Cor. 11:19), and he presumed God had supplied scripture for their use. Without sacred literature heretics would have nothing of consequence to misread. Without contests over critical passages, there could be no winners, no losers—no heretics.1 The difficulty, Tertullian acknowledged, was that heretics were the poorest of losers; they never conceded defeat. He advised against trying to take (or take back) scripture passage by passage. The only way to get the best of heretics and get on with the work of interpreting texts correctly was to deny heretics' right to appeal to scripture.2 It had been supplied for them, but only to enable wayward expositors to identify themselves as heretics. This was Tertullian's version of “enough rope.” Heretics' expositions showed others how far the expositors deviated from the precious tradition originating with the apostles, and to assist those others apologists introduced a rule of faith condensing the apostles' instruction and tradition. Tertullian's several presentations of the rule of faith raise important questions; discrepancies prompt suspicion that no precise formulation or rule inspired consensus, that rules were rather makeshift. At the time, however, Tertullian obviously was more interested in another discrepancy, the one between his rule(s) expressing Christianity's incontrovertible truths and the opinions and exegesis of benighted heretics, for God provided heretics, apologists, and controversy to keep traditional or “regular” Christianity advancing on its proper course.3 Tertullian's confidence in the advance of Christianity is the subject of this paper. How did he come by it and just how did he relate the persistence of heresy to the progress of Christianity?

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.

Several scholars, including Workman, Cragg, Dreyer, and now Henry Rack, have called attention to Wesley's endorsement of Locke's philosophy (within limits) and, more broadly, to the debt which he owed to empiricist psychology and theories of knowledge. Wesley read the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1725 during the interval between his commencement as a Bachelor of Arts and his election to a Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford. The book made a favorable impression which endured to the end of his life. During the decade of the eighties, for instance, Wesley published a series of extracts from the Essay, books I and II, in his Arminian Magazine (volumes 5–7, 1782–1784). He also praised The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding and Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Divine, books written by Peter Browne (died 1735), an Irish bishop and philosopher whom Locke had influenced to a considerable degree. Indeed, at one juncture, Wesley expressed a preference for Browne over Locke. He wrote in his journal for 6 December 1756, “I began reading to our preachers the late Bishop of Cork's Treatise on Human Understanding, in most points far clearer and more judicious than Mr. Locke's, as well as designed to advance a better cause.”

The literature dealing with those women and men who dedicated themselves to teaching the newly freed slaves in the South during Reconstruction has grown considerably in recent years. From W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, with its positive depiction of the role of these teachers through Henry L.ee Swint's 1941 work, The Northern Teacher in the South, with its negative stereotype to more recent works, we now have a body of literature which has begun to examine this group in a more thorough and complex manner.1 The general stereotype which often appears in the literature is of the missionar teacher as a white woman from New England, fresh from the abolitionist movement. While it is true that many teachers fit into this category, there were also many African-American teachers and missionaries, both women and men.2 A good deal of the literature has dealt, at least briefly, with the ways in which African-American men functioned in the context of such organizations as the American Missionary Association (AMA). However, the experience of these men was different from that of African- American women, in part because these men were more likely to be givenadministrative positions in the organizations, either as principals, field agents, or supported missionaries. Most of the women, then, were more likely to remain “in the trenches” as teachers during their tenure with the missionary society.3

With the death of Duke George of Saxony on 17 April 1539, the Reformation lost one of its fiercest enemies, a leader of great prestige who not only resisted the Reformation, but actively campaigned against it.1 With the accession of his brother Heinrich, the Reformers gained an important ally, for the new duke had converted to Lutheranism in 1537. The union of Saxony, which had been divided a half-century before, under the banner of Protestantism would have been one of the great political triumphs of the new religious movement.2 The Reformers themselves certainly considered it a good sign.3

In 1566 when the Puritan ministers John Gough and John Philpot were suspended from their pulpits and banished from London for their refusal to wear the white outer robe, or surplice, marking their special holiness as priests of the church, a crowd of more than two hundred women gathered at London Bridge to cheer them on as they left the city. As Gough and Philpot crossed the bridge, the women pressed bags of food and bottles of drink on them, all the while “animating them most earnestly to stand fast in the same their doctrine.” That same year, when John Bartlett was also ordered to step down from his pulpit in London for refusing to wear the surplice, sixty women assembled at the home of his bishop to protest the suspension. Such demonstrations of women's support for Puritan ministers were not isolated events. As the historian of Elizabethan Puritanism Patrick Collinson asserted, “it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defence of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later.”

In the fifty years since the emergence of the neo-evangelical movement, the connotations of the word “evangelical” have changed significantly. Richard Quebedeaux charts an evolution of the movement beginning with the “neo-evangelicalism” of its founders, continuing through the “new evangelicalism” of their children, and on to the more radical evangelicalism typified by contemporary “Young Evangelicals.” Although these transitions cannot always be delineated as clearly as Quebedeaux implies, the evangelicalism of the past fifty years has certainly proved more dynamic than static and has managed to wiggle its way out of the grasp of its neo-evangelical founders.

The first generations of black Christians in Southern Africa went through a painful process of critical examination and experiment as they struggled to assimilate new economic, social, and religious values. These values were presented to them mainly by white missionaries and were based largely on European models. It was as part of this dialectical process that an independent black churches movement—quickly labeled by friends and foes the “Ethiopian Movement”—had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The independent black churches spread and multiplied rapidly in South Africa. By 1919 there were seventy-six recognized sects; however, there were many more which were not officially recognized. A black newspaper reported in 1921 that there were “at least one thousand natives within the municipal boundary of Johannesburg who call themselves ministers, but who are unattached to any recognised chuch, and who live on the offerings of their respective flocks.” Although many members of these churches were active politically, the most pervasive influence of the movement was on the ideology of African nationalism, as the role of the church became a recurring theme in debates on the development of an African national identity.

The philosophy of Auguste Comte changed irrevocably the intellectual contours of nineteenth-century Europe. In the Anglo-American world, John Stuart Mill was profoundly influenced by Comte's magisterial Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Mill's work became an important conduit through which Americans such as John Fiske, Lester F. Ward and Henry Adams encountered positivism. Comte's controversial later work (especially the Systéme de politique positive [1851–1854]) was also significant, although Mill and others became harsh critics of the so-called ‘second system.’ English admirers of Comte's bizarre social and religious blueprint did include notables, however, such as Frederic Harrison, Harriet Martineau and novelist George Eliot1.