In modern scholarship, Pope Gregory I “the Great” (590–604) is often simultaneously considered the final scion of classical Rome and the first medieval pope. The letania septiformis, a procession organized into seven groups that Gregory instituted in 590 in the face of plague and disease (and performed only once thereafter in 603), has similarly been construed as the very moment when Antiquity died and the Middle Ages were born. However, his Roman contemporaries in the papal curia largely ignored Gregory and his purportedly epochal procession. In fact, memory of the procession languished in Italy until the late-eighth century when Paul the Deacon made it the center of his Life of Gregory. At Rome, remembrance of the procession lay dormant in the papal archives until John the Deacon dug it out in the late-ninth century. How then did the letania septiformis come to be judged so pivotal? Over the course of centuries, the letania septiformis was inventively re-elaborated in literature, liturgy, and legend as part of the re-fashioning of the memory of Gregory. Shorn of its context, the letania septiformis gained greater imaginative power, becoming the emblem of Gregory's pontificate, if not also of an historical era.

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.

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

After setting forth a wider context of the role of prophecy for German medieval women, the dual medieval tradition of prophecy as visionary and as interpretation of scripture, and the protestant emphasis on prophecy as interpretation of scripture, this essay demonstrates that Argula von Grumbach, Katharina Schütz Zell, and Marie Dentière not only echoed the appeals to the priesthood of all believers made by contemporary male reformers, they also embraced the teachings of these same male reformers that viewed prophecy as interpretation of scripture. In this way, prophecy became a significant lens by which Argula von Grumbach, Katharina Schütz Zell, and Marie Dentière conceived of themselves and their ministries—an understanding often lacking in the secondary sources that study these women. Specifically, it will be shown that each of these women employed Old Testament prophecy in ways that parallel contemporary male reformers' use of prophecy: presenting herself as speaking God's Word and not her own, locating her ministry within a larger biblical prophetic tradition, interpreting contemporary situations in the light of biblical prophecy and to distinguish between true and false prophets. The article concludes by exploring whether the male reformers actually intended this application of their teachings for women and exploring what is distinctive in these women's views and uses of prophecy.

This article examines how religious controversy affected antebellum Kentucky's legal culture and helped construct the relationship between church and state. It incorporates legal theory to broaden conceptions of law and argues that Baptist churches served as important legal sites for their communities. More than simply punishing moral transgressions, churches litigated disputes that under common law and within county courts would be considered criminal or civil law. By acknowledging that individuals produced law outside of state institutions, the article illuminates a more complex and fluid trans-Appalachian legal culture, one in which church members and non-members alike possessed a capacious vision of law. During the late 1820s and 1830s, Kentucky Baptists faced years of discord emanating from Alexander Campbell's “Reformation.” Amidst a religious backdrop of doctrinal controversy and schism, afflicted churches witnessed a decline of disciplinary activities as individuals' ceased to envision their churches as sites for neutral dispute resolution. The failure of church courts to contain internal dissension and curtail schism led to contentious court battles over rights to local meetinghouses. As judges reviewed church disciplinary records and litigants debated religious doctrine at the courthouse, these church property disputes highlight the process of redefining church-state relations in the post-establishment era.

This essay highlights U.S. pentecostals' and charismatics' cultivation of more experiential forms of identification with Jews and with Israel that in turn played a crucial role in the global growth of Christian Zionism. Already at the turn of the twentieth century, key figures experimented with “Judeo-centric” forms of ritual and dress, merging eschatological concerns inherited from nineteenth-century Protestantism with British Israelite ideas equating Anglo-Saxons with the lost tribes of Israel. In subsequent decades these racial notions were pushed to the fringes of the pentecostal movement, but the intense sense of identification with Israel remained. Building on the emergent mythology in the midcentury U.S. of a shared “Judeo-Christian tradition,” adherents increasingly stressed their religious and cultural (as opposed to racial) connections with God's “chosen people.” And by the late twentieth century, the 1960s counterculture, a burgeoning emphasis on the therapeutic, and growing religious diversity all facilitated pentecostals' and charismatics' renewed experimentation with “exotic” Israel-themed rituals. Significantly, believers' appropriation of Jewish-based religious practices and identities transcended nationalistic categories, and reinforced post-American sensibilities in important respects. As such, U.S.-based evangelists and broadcast ministries were able to disseminate pentecostalized expressions of Christian Zionism well beyond North America, and help catalyze a transnational, global movement.

In 1921, Shailer Mathews coined what became a classic, yet somewhat obtuse, definition of the social gospel in North American religious history. He defined it as “the application of the teaching of Jesus and the total message of the Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions such as the state, the family, as well as to individuals.” For all the problems with Mathews's definition, it does serve as a useful template for understating the social gospel, especially interpreting what Mathews meant by the phrase, “the total message of the Christian salvation.”

Three vignettes underscore that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States, social gospels often fared best outside the walls of the institutional churches. They also reveal diverging interpretations of Christianity and the church that begin to explain the divergence between religious liberalism and social progressivism during this time.

The social gospel movement in the United States began as a faith-based, grassroots movement of laity and clergy in the aftermath of the Civil War. During this era, American society faced extreme levels of social instability resulting not only from wartime trauma and loss, but also relocation of massive numbers of those emancipated from slavery, a rapidly accelerated pace of both industrialization and urbanization and unprecedented waves of immigration.

Jane Addams was not a theologian or a minister; she held no university position. However, in her role as head resident of the Hull-House settlement she became a social theorist of democracy and one of its most influential interpreters. Her primary interest was not in religious institutions, but in the moral and ethical concerns of public life in American society. Was it a good society? Did the people share in a common life? Were the least of them nurtured and protected? In 1892, Addams declared, “This renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism is going on in America, in Chicago, if you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ.”