Implementation of the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council dramatically expanded the practice of auricular confession among laypeople. Although the Council's canons also insist upon the seal of confession in order to keep the content of confessions secret, thirteenth-century authorities differ over the boundaries of the seal. As a result, the “secrets” of confession are often revealed in at least general terms in order to provide preachers with entertaining exempla for moral or doctrinal instruction. What is revealed from confession not only provides a window onto medieval private lives, but it also provided confessors with information about human activities—especially sexual practices—that might otherwise be unavailable to them. With such information, learned confessors not only encouraged moral reform but also defended claims of Aristotelian biology on human nature and sexuality.

Christianization was an important and traumatic event that became embedded in the cultural memory of Icelanders. Through the reconstruction of this event in historical narratives, there was an ongoing debate on the identity of Icelanders as a group as the cultural heritage of this group was institutionalized and cultivated by particular organizations and individuals. This is reflected in very different emphasis on individual agents in this process, which can be found in various historical works composed between 1070 and 1330. The general trend is that the narrative became more inclusive for a larger group with each major version, as the leading role passed from the Archbishop to a select group of few leading families to a larger group including leaders from all parts of Iceland and, finally, to the general population, the humble as well as the mighty.

The third-century martyr text that tells the story of Perpetua and her coreligionists as they witnessed to their faith in Carthage—the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas—is much beloved by modern readers. It purports to be Perpetua's prison diary, and, as such, it is the earliest writing by a Christian woman that has been preserved. In the fifth century, two shorter texts—the Acts—were written that recount in quite different ways the experiences of these North African Christians. In this essay, I explore the ways these shorter accounts reimagine the original text as well as the possible motives for doing so. The fifth-century author did not merely shorten the Passion; he made marked changes to it. It presents, for instance, a dramatic change in the death scene: whereas the Passion narrates Perpetua drawing the gladiator's sword to her own throat, the Acts report that she was killed by a lion. An analysis of these revisions to the Passion suggest the author was working from an Augustinian perspective. The author revised the Passion to deny the Donatists’ claims to the Carthaginian martyrs. The author's revision of Perpetua's death, therefore, is best understood as a rejection of Donatist desires for martyrdom.

There is surprisingly little evidence to suggest that bishops played a major role in initiating and overseeing missionary endeavors between the second and fourth centuries CE. John Chrysostom (d. 407), who directed a number of missionary enterprises as the bishop of Constantinople, represents one well-established exception. This article argues that Chrysostom cultivated his distinctive approach to mission during his formative years in Antioch by tracing the key features of Chrysostom's mission strategy back to the activities of his episcopal mentors in Antioch, especially their efforts to promote the Christianization of the surrounding rural areas and their assertion of jurisdictional claims over regions beyond the Roman Empire. In conjunction with these activities, Chrysostom developed his own scriptural justification for mission during this period in which he advocated for emulation of the apostle Paul, who was, in his estimation, Christianity's missionary exemplar.

This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's relationship with God; then its subsequent incorporation into the discussion over the theological consequences of arguments in favor of animal rationality, as well as its uses in anti-atheist apologetics; and then the sudden disappearance of the definition of man as animal religiosum at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article hopes to make a useful contribution to our understanding of changing early modern understandings of human nature by reasserting the significance of theological writing in the dispute over the relationship between humans and beasts. As a consequence, it offers a more wide-ranging account of man as animal religiosum than the current focus on “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism” allows.

Although religious polemic is typically understood and studied as a phenomenon of mutual antagonism across the confessions—Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant—the growth of the early modern polemic traditions was the product of heated internal controversy. In a series of theses intended to point to rhetorical aspects of conflicts within the Lutheran and Catholic confessions, this paper brings forward features of polemical writings from the disputes between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists in the wake of the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and those between and among Jesuits and Jansenists in the seventeenth century. Early modern religious thought, I suggest, cannot be understood without attention to the fissures within the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.

This study seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of both the Reformed church consistory and women's experience of the Reformation by examining the interactions between the Reformed church consistory and women in the small French town of Courthézon. For the period from 1617 to 1631, it analyzes how the consistory treated women in its exercise of discipline and how women in turn treated the consistory. It examines in-depth a number of cases of women summoned by the consistory for various offenses, including quarreling, dancing, marital and sexual relations, and absence from services. The interactions were complex and suggest that both male patriarchy and female agency were at work. Yet the consistory also treated the two sexes similarly in certain instances. Women demonstrated a remarkable capacity to ignore, negotiate with, and on occasion defy the consistory. One extraordinary woman rejected the consistory's authority altogether when pressed to reconcile. The cases also indicate that the process of consistorial discipline aided women by providing opportunities for them to represent and act for themselves. The consistory was guided by a desire to keep its minority community intact: it showed remarkable patience, forbearance, and a willingness to compromise in its efforts, and it consequently was usually successful.

In 1641, the Congregational minister Thomas Goodwin delivered a series of sermons to his independent church in London, expounding the letter to the Ephesians in characteristically meticulous detail. Goodwin had recently returned to England after a brief but formative period of religious exile in the Netherlands, and as the Sundays passed, his auditors were surely moved by the oratory of a speaker so “blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment.” The minister's breadth was equally impressive. The sermons opened up a cornucopia of Christian themes, flowing from one topic to the next as Goodwin's capacious mind found stimulus in the scriptural text. Seemingly eager to follow every possible digression, application, and excursus, Goodwin's unhurried pace required thirty-six sermons simply to exhaust the epistle's first chapter. And yet, amid this abundance of subject matter, one issue in particular arrested Goodwin's attention. While delivering his thirty-fifth discourse on Ephesians, Goodwin paused to consider what he described as “the Great question of these times” and, alternatively, “the great Controversy of the times.” By the middle of 1641, Goodwin's world was experiencing an unprecedented upheaval—England had been invaded by Scottish covenanters, the archbishop of Canterbury had been arrested and imprisoned, and the king had been forced to call a parliament he would be unable to dissolve. Yet Goodwin's “great Controversy” turned not upon political or cultural convulsion but rather upon a seemingly obscure point of ecclesiastical polity, a question not often considered by modern historians and even less often fully appreciated: “the great Question of these times,” said Goodwin, was “whether yea or no . . . many congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” What did this strangely worded question mean to Goodwin and his hearers, and why did the future president of Magdalen College and religious adviser to the Lord Protector deem this rather specific query the very hinge upon which the nation's future turned? To answer these questions, we must consider how the early modern English mind understood the idea of a “national church”—for though he does not explicitly invoke the term, it was, as we will see, a concept embedded at the very center of Goodwin's “great Controversy.”

The so-called Notícias Recônditas, an anonymous account written in the context of the negotiations that led to the suspension of Inquisition-related actions in Portugal between 1674 and 1681, has been approached by historiography principally from the points of view of its controversial authorship, its compositional framework, and even the accuracy of its contents. This article proposes a different perspective, focusing on its circulation and reception in the eighteenth-century England. Comparing different handwritten and printed versions of this text reveals numerous additions, transformations, and adaptations of its contents and structure, from its moment of composition until its publication and even afterwards. Eighteenth-century London, where anti-Catholic polemical literature was flourishing, is the place of publication of the first editions. There, Notícias was also appropriated by Anglican polemists with one main purpose in mind: attacking the Catholic Church. This, however, did not suit the text's original goals of making contributions to reforms to the Inquisition in Portugal and raising awareness for the New Christian cause. Therefore, identifying and analyzing the discrepancies among the different versions of the text give way to new questions concerning the intervention of copyists, translators, compilers, and publishers in order to achieve specific objectives and to reach target audiences.

This article explores the newly catalogued manuscripts of the English Poor Clares preserved in Palace Green Library, Durham. It argues that the collection advances our understanding of the spirituality of the Poor Clares, a group who have received substantially less attention than their Benedictine and Carmelite counterparts. Focusing on manuscript evidence relating to mysticism at the convents of Aire and Rouen, it suggests three areas of interest to scholars of English women religious and recusant Catholic spirituality. First, it explores how a dual understanding of unio mystica in the convents converted wider concepts of anonymity and self-effacement into a radical form of authorial poverty. Through this, the nuns sought not only to unite with God but also achieve a symbolic union with each other. Secondly, it explores how the physical objects of the crucifix and Eucharist served to inspire a deeper mystical pattern of growth within the souls of the nuns. It suggests that feast days and specific times of the year, especially building up to Easter, had a profound effect on spiritual outpourings. Finally, the article explores the importance of the concept of the “heavenly Jerusalem” to the Poor Clares, revealing its centrality to their understanding of their life as a pilgrimage and their own lived experience as exiles.

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.

This essay examines the colonial relationship between the Anglican Church and the British Empire's Welsh subjects across the nineteenth century. Focusing on the small output of a group of exiled Welsh clergymen (known as The Association of Welsh Clergy in the West Riding of the County of York), I consider Welsh Anglican responses to the church's neglect of Wales (exemplified by no Welsh-speaking bishop being assigned to a Welsh diocese between 1727 and 1870, despite the majority of the population not speaking English). The association believed that preaching in a foreign language such as English constituted a perversion from proper church practice and that this both reflected hegemonic attitudes toward indigenous and non-English speaking populations and pushed the Welsh population toward dissent. In response, the association sought to combine church reform with Welsh nationalism by elevating Welsh speakers as the spiritual inheritors of the true and primitive British church. They promulgated their visions in annual reports published between 1852 and 1856 into which they channeled other contemporary voices speaking against tyrannical and “Romish” Anglican Church practices. Through an analysis of post-Reformation Welsh church histories and the reports’ usages of such terminology as “alienation,” “Catholicism,” and “patriotism,” I reveal how the Welsh national identity the association fashioned at once operated within and aspired to correct the Anglican Church.

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.

By examining Booker T. Washington's (little studied) relationship with Mormon elites, this article introduces the category of “usefulness” to scholars who investigate how racially and religiously marginalized Americans have sought acceptance in the “white American republic.” Washington's 1913 visit to Utah was the high point in a decade-long public campaign of mutual admiration. Washington and the Mormons’ high regard for each other—an aberration in much of black-Mormon relations—was based on similar histories of discrimination at the hands of white Protestant Americans. It was also based on similar beliefs that to overcome their status as “problem” people, Washington-led blacks and Mormons had to prove their “usefulness”—a form of respectability politics—to themselves and to the American republic. To do so, they pointed to the fruits of their own and each other's usefulness: economic productivity, educational advancement, and middle-class mores. While these fruits were similar, the roots were different, and racialized. For the Mormons, usefulness arose from a post-polygamy Mormon religion through which they asserted their whiteness. For Washington, usefulness arose not from the “Negro” church—the only independent black institution in American history—but from educational institutions like Tuskegee, which promoted black advancement under the control of white supremacy.

The debates about female fashion in the new Republic of Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s saw papal representatives, bishops, leading public intellectuals, and members of Catholic youth movements argue about deep décolletés and short skirts. In this predominantly Catholic country, objections made against modern fashion may initially look like a conservative stand against modern developments. Studying more closely the debate around women's fashion as it developed in a particular subset of the Catholic population in Lithuania—educated youth in the Ateitis Catholic student association, this article examines the interconnected arguments that were woven together to evaluate what women should wear in interwar Lithuania and shows that Catholics in this northeastern European country aimed to create a modern national and rational woman. At issue were not just Catholic moral norms but also national identity and the challenges posed by mass consumer culture. The new ideal being proposed was a modern Catholic female intelligentsia, a gender ideal that embraced the opportunities offered in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as suffrage, education, urban living, more active participation in civic life, while retaining more conservative moral norms, questioning consumer culture, and debating woman's nature and mission.

In 1833, the Swiss city-republic of Basel separated into two distinct cantons. During the three-year period known as the “Troubles” (Wirren), landowners in the countryside, inspired by the French July Revolution of 1830, rebelled against the city government. The roots of the division, however, run deeper in Basel's religious and theological culture and also reflect the outgrowth of the German Confederation's “persecution of demagogues.” This article examines these neglected aspects of the cantonal division, showing the importance of Christianity, and the complex politics of Protestantism, in Europe's revolutionary century.

On the first Sunday of Advent in 2017, a new university church was consecrated at Leipzig University in Germany. This celebration brought to an end the five-decade-long absence of a church within the old university. The inauguration of the Paulinum—as the combined church and assembly hall was named—visibly reconnected the university with a church history involving the active participation of personalities such as Martin Luther, Johann Tetzel, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Under scrutiny in this article is the 1968 destruction of the University Church of Saint Paul, originally a medieval monastery, by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as a kind of socialist iconoclasm. Through the destruction of the University Church of Saint Paul, I argue, the church became something of an architectonic and cultural martyr. Although the Paulinum is not viewed as a direct continuation of the university church, its completion and refurbishing with art treasures from the old church has, however, come to be viewed as a counterpart to SED barbarism and as an undoing of some aspects of the destruction. Moreover, some episodes from the university church and its destruction have been passed on and attached to the Paulinum as a mnemonic layer, much valued by the university, city, and region.

Historians of science and religion usually trace the origins of the “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion have been in perennial “conflict” or “warfare,” to the historical narratives of John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918). While Draper and White have been designated cofounders of the conflict thesis, there has been little research on how contemporaries responded to their narratives. This paper examines the early reception of these narratives by considering the extensive commentary they received in British and American periodicals from 1856 to 1900. Sampling a selection of this material suggests that while many rejected Draper and White's interpretation of the past, many others agreed with them in affirming that theological dogmatism came into conflict with the advance of human knowledge. This essay also suggests that Draper and White may have had a more nuanced position about the history of science and religion than has been contended by modern scholars. Whatever their intentions, however, their historical narratives had the unintended consequence of creating in the minds of their contemporaries and later generations the belief that science and religion have been and are at war.