The past ten years have seen great strides in our understanding of the many forces at work in Counter-Reformation Spain. Historians and hispanists have demonstrated clearly that the Spanish religious landscape was complex and have elucidated several problems of interpretation. How readily did Spanish monarchs, religious leaders, and laity follow the decrees of the Council of Trent? How influential was the Spanish Inquisition in enforcing religious beliefs and behaviors? In what ways did religious reform involve assumptions about gender and differing religious roles for men and women? Finally, and more to my point, how did men and women respond to such assumptions and roles?

The church historian Socrates Scholasticus tells a story about an encounter during the Council of Nicaea between the emperor Constantine and the schismatic bishop Acesius. On learning that Acesius's dispute had nothing to do with the Creed or the date of Easter—the two major issues under debate at that Council—Constantine asked, “For what reason then do you separate yourself from communion with the rest of the Church?” Acesius replied that his sect objected to the relative leniency with which other Christians had treated those who had cracked under the empire-wide persecutions of the third century. He then “referred to the rigidness of that austere canon which declares, that it is not right that persons who after baptism have committed a sin, which the sacred Scriptures denominate ‘a sin unto death’ be considered worthy of participation in the sacraments.” Whereupon, Socrates continues, the emperor said to him, “Place a ladder, Acesius, and climb alone into heaven.”

In America the category ‘bible’ enjoys a privileged cultural position. That fact was brought home to me anecdotally several years ago when I received a telephone call forwarded through a departmental secretary. The woman on the other end of the line expressed frustration because she did not know what to do with a worn-out Bible. She asked if there was a proper way to handle the situation: should she bury it, or burn it? She was genuinely perplexed. Of one thing alone was she certain: she could not throw the Bible into a garbage can. As it turned out, I was of little help. I knew no liturgy for disposing of old Bibles, nor any special protocol for handling them. But I also do not remember ever throwing one away. I am accustomed to seeing old Bibles in attics or on shelves of used-book stores. The telephone call underscored in a practical way the special aura that surrounds the ‘bible’ in America.

Historians of early-seventeenth-century English religion are deeply divided over whether the church of the 1630s was characterized by more general theological and liturgical agreement and tolerant ecumenism, or by escalating conflict over theology and ceremonies, driven in part by virulent anti-popery and culminating in the violence of the 1640s. Those who see conflict acknowledge that such categories as Puritan and Anglican are unwarranted for what was really a spectrum of opinion, with the moderate range heavily occupied. Still, they find antecedents of the Civil War in longstanding quarrels over theology and ceremony. For those who find the Caroline church a consensual body, on the other hand, the causes of that war “remain elusive.” Having discarded as simplistic the plot line of the received version, which proceeds inexorably from Elizabethan dissent to “Puritan Revolution,” they now substitute short-term contingency and the sudden flourishing of a lunatic fringe. In the process of trying to sort out the complexity of contemporary theological opinion, they have lost the thread of the story they were trying to tell.

The breakup of Western Christendom in the sixteenth century gained momentum when an academic theologian called into question the theology of the church in his day. Martin Luther wanted to discuss theology when he posted his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. In the ensuing years, Luther and the “Lutherans” were forced to forge their theology in the heat of an intensely polemical and conflict-ridden environment. They responded to the theological issues raised by their opponents, as well as to the real pastoral concerns of the emerging evangelical church in Protestant lands.

“Use Auriol's Compendium as a mould, pour in Lyre, flavor with Augustine, and sprinkle with Grosseteste.” This was John Wyclif's (1330–1384) recipe for biblical commentary. It may be the nature of biblical commentary that commentators do not follow recipes closely, but the history of how the admirers of Nicholas of Lyra's Apocalypse Commentary (1329) received and reworked it indicates that Nicholas's work served frequently as the “mould” into which other interpretations were “poured,” while his own Augustinian seasonings were largely ignored. Although later commentators often adopted Nicholas's method, they more frequently poured in the ingredients of his younger Franciscan colleague, Peter Auriol (whose Apocalypse Commentary of 1319 Nicholas sharply critiqued), serving up a dish that Nicholas would not have enjoyed eating.

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791), was a central figure in the eighteenth-century religious revival that swept across England and Wales. A faithful daughter of the Church of England, Lady Huntingdon became a “Methodist” when that term described a style of piety rather than denominational affiliation. She was a pivotal figure in early Methodism, around whom the Calvinistic and Arminian wings of the movement revolved. Selina frequently described herself as being engaged in “this present Reformation” of England. A close examination of her piety—which stressed justification by faith—and her many ministerial works suggests that Lady Huntingdon was indeed a significant religious reformer; this examination offers a divergent path to the complicated roots of early Methodism.

Forced to choose between conversion and death, many medieval Jews chose to be baptized as Christians. While not all Jews in Western Europe faced such stark choices, during the fourteenth century pressure increased on the Jewish minority to join the Christian majority. Economic, social, and political barriers to Jews often made conversion a necessity or at least an advantage, exerting a degree of coercion even without brute force. Once baptized these new Christians, called conversi, were required to abandon their Jewish practices entirely. But what kind of life actually awaited these converts? In the abstract, the converts had clear options: they could either remain Christians or return to judaism. Reality would surely reveal a range of possibilities, however, as these conversi tried to live out their conversion or to reject it without running afoul of the authorities. While the dominant Christian culture undoubtedly exerted pressure to convert, Jews did not necessarily sit idly by while their people approached the baptismal font. Some conversi felt contrary pressure to take up Judaism again. In the most extreme cases, conversi who reverted to Judaism faced death as well. This paper examines forces exerted on Jewish converts to Christianity to return to Judaism, using examples from France and northern Spain in the first half of the fourteenth century.

The struggle between village priest and schoolteacher in France over education, the struggle for the minds of the young, has a long history. Although it reached its peak in the Third Republic, it developed throughout the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, evidence is heavily anecdotal, so we do not actually know how extensive or intensive it was, and thus how significant for the history of France.

The relatively few monographs on Calvin's baptismal theology have generally been done without regard to chronological development and historical context. This has been unfortunate because diachronic studies on Luther's and Zwingli's baptismal theology have shown theological shifts in emphasis depending on historical context. As we shall see, studies on Calvin's ecclesiology from 1536 through 1543 show a sequential development—a progression which, upon close examination, has a significant impact on his baptismal teaching over time.

“It is a special joy for me to hear that our good and pious table companion and house guest [Robert Barnes] has been so graciously called by God to pour out his blood for the sake of God's dear Son and to become a holy martyr.” Martin Luther's reflection on the death of this friend, the English churchman and diplomat, in 1540typified his attitude toward martyrdom as his followers experienced it at the hands of Roman Catholic opponents. He continued, “Thanks, praise, and honor be to the Father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, who has let us see the same kind of times which were seen at the beginning [of the church], times in which his Christians, who had eaten and drunk with us (as the apostles said of Christ, Acts 4 ) … are taken away before our very eyes and from our eyes and our side to martyrdom (that is, to heaven) and become saints.”

During the last years of his ministry in Strasbourg, the Protestant reformer Martin Bucer and his fellow pastors introduced a new procedure for the exercise of church discipline, the voluntary enrollment of their parishioners in “Christian fellowships.” The parish structures created in Strasbourg have been regarded as forerunners of Pietist conventicles ever since the late seventeenth century, when Philip Jakob Spener justified his own Pietist assemblies by publishing a memorandum in which Bucer had defended the “Christian fellowships.” In the twentieth century, Gustav Anrich brought the attempt to establish “Christian fellowships” to the attention of scholars in his publication of an abridged version of Bucer's initial proposal. Anrich's student, Werner Bellardi, wrote the standard study of the movement's origin, development, and eventual disappearance on the basis of documents preserved in the Strasbourg archives. In their discussions of the movement, both Anrich and Bellardi were led astray by their assumption that Bucer originally intended to form conventicles of believers within the city's official church. In fact, those enrolled in “Christian fellowships” did not begin meeting together until the autumn of 1547, almost a year after Bucer first proposed the enrollment procedure.

When they regained power at Westminster in November 1830, the Whigs were dedicated to reform without knowing exactly where to begin. For decades they had committed themselves to financial “retrenchment” and parliamentary reform and now they hoped to pacify an angry country by dealing with those two great issues. Indeed, their main objective was to restore public confidence in the constitution and to prevent a French-style revolution. But their approach to reform in 1830 was uncertain and unpromising. Their vague intentions can be partly explained by their lack of party organization and cohesion; in Parliament, Whigs served as individual opponents of Tory policies rather than as supporters of an alternative government. Factionalism among the Whigs had kept them out of office for more than a generation. Some Whigs were considered unpatriotic because they persisted in defending the ideals of the French Revolution. Still others were hostile to the notion of reform because they suspected that the Tories had already given the country as much reform as it could digest. For many Whigs, the extension of civil liberties to Dissenters (in 1828) and then to Roman Catholics (in 1829) was momentous enough. What the country now wanted was a sensible and flexible government which accommodated the spirit of the age by heeding public opinion. It is not surprising, therefore, that the new government in 1830 was really a coalition of liberals and moderates, and as Peter Mandler has remarked, it was a while before their potential was realized.

In 1883, the African American Baptist preacher George Washington Williams published his History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880. The book, a fundamentally optimistic account of the black presence in the New World, represented an attempt by the well-educated, northern divine to balance his commitments to an American evangelical tradition with an awareness of the ongoing oppression of his fellow African Americans at the hands of whites. “I commit this work to the public, white and black,” he noted in the preface, “to the friends and foes of the Negro in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights.” The work revealed much about Williams: his upbringing in antebellum Pennsylvania as the child of an interracial union, his training at Howard University and Newton Theological Seminary, and his work experiences at Baptist churches in New England and Ohio. But this particular passage highlights the motivating force behind the book: it reveals, in anticipation of a historical narrative of over two hundred years of African enslavement, Williams's desire to recast much of the American past. Williams's historical account was, at heart, an attempt to impart moral meaning to the present by reconstructing the historical consciousness of both blacks and whites. In this desire, Williams fit precisely Friedrich Nietzsche's characterization of “historical men,” those who “believe that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back to consider that process only to understand the present better and learn to desire the future more vehemently.”

A photograph taken in 1896, the year of Miami's incorporation, circulated widely in periodicals of the time, and it came to symbolize the founding of the city in the local and national imagination (figure 1). “That picture has gone all over this country,” one of the men who posed for it recalled, “showing the start of Miami.” In the image seventeen men stand by the mouth of the Miami River, where workers were clearing the ground for the construction of the first tourist hotel, a building owned by a wealthy northern Protestant. For the historian, the carefully posed photograph is illuminating. Most important for the purposes of this essay, it offers hints about power relations in that urban frontier. Note the four white men dressed in their Sunday best who stand behind the workers and observe the scene. They were there that day because John Sewell, the white Baptist who supervised the crew, had hurried down the dirt street to invite "the boys" to get into the historic picture. For Sewell, “the boys” meant white mainline Protestants, each of whom had arrived relatively recently to seek his fortune.

In any overall assessment of the changing relationship between the church and the state in late imperial Russia it is important to include an account of the thought and activity of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. Although not a clergyman, he was probably the most visible of all Orthodox Church figures of the period, both in the empire and in Western Europe. As the emperor's Ober Procurator of the Most Holy Governing Synod, a post he occupied between 1880 and 1905, he was the perfectly placed official to represent the power of the Romanov government in church affairs and, in its turn, the will and needs of the church to the emperor and his chief councilors of state. Nor, in this case, was it merely the office that made the man. Pobedonostsev himself was a thoughtful and critical student of Western and Russian culture who used his authority in a way that fulfilled his own visions and not the whims of the tsar. He was not a Count Protasov, the loyal Ober Procurator of Nicholas I, and he insisted that the office of Ober Procurator stand equally in the high councils of the tsar along with all other government ministries. Finally, it must be added that Pobedonostsev revealed in his thought and in his public acts a consistent body of religious and political opinion that enjoyed a respectable following among the so-called conservatives of the educated classes, and he was known and admired in this company both for the views he espoused and for the enemies he made.

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

The liturgical movement in the American Episcopal Church owes its origin to William Palmer Ladd (1870–1941), a pragmatic New England Yankee whose ideas helped reorient the church's worship and self-understanding, and came to fruition in the current liturgy, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

One of the most innovative provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act, passed by Congress in August 1964 as the heart of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, was funding for a preschool program for the youngest of America's poor, known as Head Start. Many children were qualified for Head Start in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation. This was especially so in the northwest quadrant of that state. The area, known locally as “the Delta,” was dominated by the floodplain of the lower Mississippi River, a largely rural, cotton-based economy, and tens of thousands of desperately poor, largely black, farm workers.

Once in a while, an occasion turns out to be historic, historical, and historiographical. Such an occasion was the conference on the Canadian Evangelical Experience held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, early in May 1995. This four-day conference devoted to the history of evangelicalism in Canada (thus “historical”) was the first of its kind in this country, and marked the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in this field (thus “historic”). It has become a considerable enough mass, in fact, that this review will confine itself to published books and particularly those published in the last ten years. It is a “critical” mass, furthermore, in that the conference raised explicitly and implicitly serious questions about the writing of Canadian evangelical history, some of which this essay will discuss (thus “historiographical”).