The Council of Constance has presented a problem to propapal historians since its close. On the one hand, the council ended the Great Western Schism, establishing an accepted line of popes while condemning doctrinal errors attributed to John Wyclille and John Hus. On the other hand, its decrees, llaec Santa and Freqnens, issued to safeguard the work of reunification and that of reform, later were used to justify the attempt of the Council of Basel to enact an anticurial reform of the church. Haec Santa was exalted to the level of a dogmatic definition in order to justify the Council of Basel's deposition of Eugenius IV, the second undoubted pope in the line begun at Constance.

No woman played the main role in the sixteenth-century Reformation in any country. But in Norway's Reformation Lady Inger of Austraat and two of her sons-in-law, Vincens Lunge and Nils Lykke, stand out as central and dramatic figures. Yet since Norway is a land that was then a backwater eddy in history, this Reformation tends to be overlooked. Thus historians have not recognized Lady Inger's important role.

In early January of 1749 John Wesley canceled a previously scheduled trip to Rotterdam in order to write a seventy-nine-page open letter to the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton on the subject of miracles in the early, post-apostolic church. The letter is one of Wesley's longest original writings, but it has never been studied critically. In it, Wesley's relationship to intellectual currents of his age become particularly clear, both because of the subject with which it is concerned (God's intervention in history) and because of the interlocutor to whom it is addressed (Conyers Middleton of Cambridge University).

In his comparative analysis of various millennial movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge constructs a formula for cultural change, which he defines as “old rules” to “no rules” to “new rules.” The first phase of these movements invariably involves a period of social unrest. Society deviates from the old rules as old formulas fail and institutions malfunction. People flout the political, religious, and social establishments with seemingly unpatriotic, blasphemous, and antisocial acts. In the next phase, society hangs between the old order and the new in an interim period in which neither the old standards nor the new hold sway. At that point, millennial movements often materialize in search of a new society. Burridge defines them as new cultures or social orders coming into being. Rather than “oddities” or “diseases in the body social,” they involve “the adoption of new assumptions, a new redemptive process, a new political-economic framework, a new mode of measuring the man, a new integrity, a new community: in short, a new man.” In the third and final phase, the new rules solidify as the new culture takes shape, which in time may represent the old rules and old order for a future prophetic movement. Millenarians cannot last as millenanans. They endure only as they scuttle or transform their millenarian outlook.

Many scholars have observed that during the first half of the nineteenth century American philosophy, science, and education were dominated by Scottish Realism, or the philosophy of “Common Sense.” Its first significant influence has been traced to John Witherspoon, an Edinburgh-trained minister who became president of the College of New Jersey in 1769. Thereafter, especially after 1800, Realist texts were introduced gradually into American colleges, and by the I 820s generally had replaced the older texts. Through use in numerous American colleges, the works of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, George Campbell, James Beattie, William Hamilton, and others exercised a pervasive influence.