In his recent book, Mary through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan notes that “one of the most profound and persistent roles of the Virgin Mary in history has been her function as a bridge builder to other traditions, other cultures, and other religions.” This is particularly true of the late ancient Near East, where Mary's significance frequently reached across various cultural and religious boundaries. But it is equally true that Mary often served to define boundaries between traditions, cultures, and religions. As Klaus Schreiner explains in his similarly recent book, Maria: Jungfrau, Mutter, Herrsherin, “Brücken, die Juden und Christen miteinander hätten verbinden können, schlug Maria im Mittelalter nicht… Maria trennte, grenzte aus.” In the rather substantial chapter that follows, Schreiner presents perhaps the best overview of Mary's role as a focus of Jewish/Christian conflict in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Scholars have long recognized the role played by the Virgin and her cult in the exclusion of Jews from Christian society during the Western Middle Ages, Marian piety being, along with eucharistic devotion, the most anti-Jewish aspect of medieval piety. Throughout the medieval period, and likewise continuing into the Renaissance and Reformation, the Virgin Mary figured prominently in Christian anti-Jewish literature, where the (alleged) Jewish disparagement of Virgin Mary “weighed heavier than thefts of the host, ritual murders, and … ell poisoning.”

Among the defining traits of Restoration politics was a degree of hostility between the royal court and the English episcopate unprecedented since the Reformation. A long pattern of cooperation between the king and bishops was broken after 1660. The issues of religious toleration and of Charles II's Catholic sympathies particularly divided church and court, and at times rendered them overt political opponents. Significant study has been made of the policy disagreements beneath these battles, and of the political maneuverings that resolved them. Less attention has been given the ideas and attitudes that divided the Restoration court and church leadership. This article will argue that certain intellectual shifts were required before the policy disagreements that divided Charles II's court and the bishops could emerge as open political fights.

For the Parisian humanist and Avignon papal secretary Nicolas de Clamanges, reform of the late medieval church began not in capite but with personal reform grounded in a spirituality that was itself built on patristic principles. His colleagues, including Jean Gerson and Pierre d'Ailly at the Council of Constance, first located reform institutionally in capite and expected it to trickle down in membris. Clamanges by contrast applied the fathers' emphasis on individual spiritual growth to the late medieval church: a preparatory and indispensable reformatio personalis must constantly be at work in order for broader reform to succeed. He particularly contended that God would grant each Christian guidance and lead his spiritual progress through purgative suffering in fear, humility, and solitude that followed Christ's example. Only by this path could the entire church—member by member—return to union, peace, and purity. In this way Clamanges married the patristic goal of personal reform to the prevailing interior spirituality of his age with its focus on the humanity and suffering of Christ. Clamanges's important religious ideas have frequently been overlooked, however, by the high-profile careers of his close friends d'Ailly and Gerson as well as by Clamanges's own role in French humanism. By looking at his reform thought we will take one step toward identifying Clamanges as far more than an elegant writer while we use his ideas to explore how individual spirituality and personal reform were closely aligned in the troubled church of the late Middle Ages.

Any consideration of the half-millennium of Western European popular enthusiasm from ca. 1000 to ca. 1500—beginning, say, in 994 at the Council of Anse in Burgundy with the intervention of Abbot Odilo of Cluny in the Peace of God movement, and terminating (again with an arbitrary date) on May 23, 1498, in Florence, with the hanging and burning of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, O.P.—must involve the role of the regular clergy, the professed religious of Latin Christendom. Medieval collective religious enthusiasm, especially when it was not inaugurated by ecclesiastical authority, was often divisive, attracting converts and distracting or repelling others. Monks and friars could not remain indifferent to such movements. For one thing, if their stance was deemed inappropriate, their relationship with the laity (perhaps fellow townsfolk), or the papacy, or their rich and powerful benefactors might be compromised. Nor was their role necessarily that of spectators. Members of the regular clergy sometimes participated in medieval revivals. Possibly still more important is the fact that during most of our period the regulars had the lion's share of chronicling popular enthusiasm. It is in their historical writings that medieval popular religious revivals were mythologized and memorialized. Our view of such movements, therefore, has been shaped by their perceptions and prejudices. Their narratives also provide us with a rich source from which to gauge their interpretations of medieval revivalism. For they make no attempt to conceal their attitudes toward lay enthusiasts—their suspicion, animosity, fear, approbation, sympathy, empathy.

It has been a truism in the history of medieval religious orders that the Cistercians only admitted women late in the twelfth century and then under considerable outside pressure. This view has posited a twelfth-century “Golden Age” when it had been possible for the abbots of the order of Cîteaux to avoid contact with women totally. Only later did the floodgates burst open and a great wave of women wishing to be Cistercians flood over abbots powerless to resist it. This paper reassesses narrative accounts, juridical arguments, and charter evidence to show that such assertions of the absence of any twelfthcentury Cistercian nuns are incorrect. They are based on mistaken notions of how the early Cistercian Order developed, as well as on a biased reading of the evidence, including a double standard for proof of Cistercian status—made much higher for women's houses than for men's. If approached in a gender-neutral way, the evidence shows that abbeys of Cistercian women appeared as early as those for the order's men. Evidence from which it has been argued that nuns were only imitating the Cistercian Order's practices in the twelfth century in fact contains exactly the same language that when used to describe men's houses is deemed to show them to be Cistercian. Formal criteria for incorporation of women's houses in the thirteenth century are irrelevant to a twelfth-century situation in which only gradually did most communities of monks or nuns eventually identified as Cistercian come to be part of the newly developing religious order.

During and after the Reformation, one of the most pressing issues for Protestants was to locate an appropriate answer to a disarmingly simple Catholic question: where was your church before Luther? Catholic propagandists hoped to undermine the legitimacy of Protestantism by contrasting its evident novelty against the relative antiquity of Roman Catholicism. Implicit in the charge of novelty was the accusation that Protestantism represented only a counterfeit religion. The Reformed religion was considered to be but an invention of iniquitous religious charlatans who—in league with monarchs and aristocrats—were exploiting religious credulity for material and sexual ends. Under cover of religion, they were advancing their own political power, plundering the wealth of the church and turning their backs upon the moral code of Christianity. Catholic apologists usually designated Luther and Calvin as Manichean heretics—from the thirdcentury dualist heresy of Manes.

The purpose of this article is to address the controversial issue of the status of the Utraquist Church in the Kingdom of Bohemia in consequence of the drafting of the Bohemian Confession in 1575. The chronological scope is limited to the period up to 1609, when the issuance of the Letter of Majesty in 1609 formalized the gentlemen's agreement of 1575 and altered the ecclesiastical structure accordingly. According to Czech historiography, the parliamentary action of 1575– which granted toleration, albeit tacit and conditional, to the Lutherans and the Bohemian Brethren—represented a moment of truth for traditional Utraquism, which dated to the original Bohemian Reformation. On the one hand, the Utraquists' choice was to reaffirm its late medieval reformist tradition that preserved the traditional liturgy (including the seven sacraments), a belief in the sacramental episcopate and priesthood in a historic apostolic succession, and the belief in the efficaciousness of good works in the drama of salvation. On the other hand, their choice was to embrace the Lutheran Reformation, which rejected all the doctrines just enumerated.

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be!—and all was light,” according to Alexander Pope. Other British subjects were not so sure. In recent years, historians have begun to take more seriously the persons who opposed Newton on either philosophical, scientific or theological grounds. Rival systems of natural philosophy were already in the field, including the scholastic, the alchemical, and especially the Cartesian. Newton had learned a great deal from Descartes, but he also set out to correct the errors in his system. Many Cartesians, at least in the period shortly after 1687, were not convinced by Newton's arguments. His methodology was suspect as well. The mathematics that Newton had invented was hard to follow and the role that it played in his system was unfamiliar. Political antipathies sometimes led to the rejection of Newtonianism. But the crux of the problem was theological. Newton's natural philosophy, as stated in his Principia Mathematica, seemed to undermine the traditional doctrines of the Christian religion.

We know relatively little about prophecies or “exercises” that early Elizabethan reformers devised as in-service training. Nearly all textbooks report that Archbishop Grindal objected to government orders that prophesying be suppressed, for, in 1576, his reservations cost him the queen's and regime's confidence. Yet the suppressed exercises have lately been depicted as tame Elizabethan adaptations of continental practices that featured sermons delivered publicly but discussed only clerically. That was so in Zurich, Emden, and elsewhere, but I think that if we look at prophesying again, look, that is, at what the critics, patrons, and partisans said about the exercises in England, we will discover that lay involvement and initiative were just as subversive and disruptive as some thought at the time.

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.

Thomas Jefferson belonged to a generation of common-sense rationalists who hoped that religious tolerance in the United States would put an end to religious quarreling. Once freed to practice religion as they pleased, adult citizens, Jefferson thought, would recognize the moral advantages of nondogmatic creeds and treat religion as a philosophical inquiry based not on Scripture but on what was selfevidently true. Religion, a subject for mature minds who could weigh evidence, was not for infants. Young children, he said, were “at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries.” Children had to learn to think about religion gradually and to study it with a questioning mind only after they had attained adulthood.

John Eck's allegation that those advancing justification by faith alone were themselves finding it necessary to distinguish different types of faith describes accurately the reality in the evangelical movement in the 1530s–1550s. The Reformers' initial clarity and optimism about saving faith is seen, for example, in Article 20 of the Augsburg Confession (1530), which describes the scriptural view of faith as a confidence in God and a certain assurance of God's grace. Moreover, the Confession carefully distinguishes this true faith from both mere knowledge of historical events concerning Christ and from virtuous actions that spring from faith, and does not deign to designate these latter legitimate types of faith. However, subsequent dissension within the Protestant camp over the Law (Johann Agricola, for example), justification (Andreas Osiander, for example), and the sacraments, combined with the continued criticism of those Catholic opponents designated by Eck as “the faithful,” forced the magisterial Reformers to defend and, in some cases, refine their understandings of faith. Missing from Eck's assessment, however, is an indication of how exegetical activity in addition to polemical exchanges might attest and even contribute to this reevaluation. In this regard, the Gospel of John constitutes an especially important area for investigation. Protestant understandings of faith were drawn from and bolstered by Pauline texts, especially Rom. 1:17, 3:28, 4:3–9, and 10:17; Gal. 4:6; and Heb.

S. L. Ollard's 1926 study of the Church of England's understanding and practice of the rite of confirmation remains the most significant examination of this topic for the eighteenth century. He insisted that eighteenth-century Anglicans took a low view of the rite, contending that the religious consequences of the Glorious Revolution set the tone for Anglican sacramental views. That the church allowed three unconfirmed monarchs (William III and the first two Georges) to receive the Eucharist provided evidence of the neglect of this rite. Louis Weil more recently echoes Ollard's critique, suggesting that after 1660 Anglican writers “virtually ignored the rite.” Weil believes that interest in the rite was limited to Thomas Wilson, the eighteenth-century bishop of Sodor and Man, and a few like-minded members of the “old high church tradition.” Thus, according to most accounts, Anglicans gave little attention to confirmation until the nineteenth century, when the Tractarians supposedly rediscovered the importance of the rite. Ironically, Weil undermines his own position by pointing out that the only “concentrated material” on the rite in the Tracts for the Times was a reprinting of the work on confirmation by the eighteenth-century bishop of Sodor and Mann, Thomas Wilson.

“Lord God, now we praise you, you worthy Holy Spirit! The church in unity honors you, the mother of Christendom. All the angels and the host of heaven and whoever serves the honor of the Son; also the cherubim and seraphim, sing with a clear voice: ‘Divine majesty, who proceeds from the Father, who praises the Son as the creator and points to his suffering.’ … Daily O Mother! whoever knows you and the Savior glorifies you because you bring the gospel to all the world.” These lines are from the Te Matrem, a prayer to the Holy Spirit that for nearly thirty years was a regular part of worship for a German Protestant group known as the Brüdergemeine. The Brüdergemeine, commonly called the Moravian Church today, was an international religious community that developed an elaborate and creative liturgical life for its carefully regulated communities. The Brethren's intense devotion to the suffering of Christ is the most famous aspect of their worship, but in the mid-eighteenth century their leader, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, actively encouraged the Brüdergemeine to worship the Holy Spirit as the mother of the church. Surprisingly, though, this aspect of Zinzendorf's theology has been largely overlooked or downplayed by historians and theologians in the past two hundred years. When it has been discussed, it has been dismissed as a brief aberration or experiment that was discarded after the so-called Sifting Time (Sichtungzeit.) The Sifting Time was a period of liturgical and social excess in the community, the details of which remain quite obscure. The Brethren used the word Sichtungzeit to refer to a time when the community was in danger of becoming a fanatical sect. Dates for the Sifting Time range from a high of 1736–52 to a low of 1746–49, but the most common dating is 1743–50. This article will show that the use of maternal imagery for the Holy Spirit was not a tangential or quixotic aspect of Zinzendorf's theology, but thrived for more than thirty years and was, in Zinzendorf's words, “an extremely important and essential point … and all our Gemeine and praxis hangs on this point.”

On 31 September 1929, James Myers, the industrial secretary of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), arrived in Marion, North Carolina, to investigate the causes for the continuing industrial unrest that had swept across the southern textile industry since the spring. Shortly after Myers's arrival, as the textile workers attempted to picket the plant, sheriff's deputies fired into the crowd, killing six strikers and wounding twenty-five others. Myers's eulogy for the slain workers admonished the mill owners for the harsh working conditions and low wages, but mostly for their opposition to their workers' right to organize. He also scolded clergymen who argued that industrial conflict was “not the Church's business.” Over the ensuing months, Myers set an example of Christian involvement in labor unrest. He investigated the strike's impact on the community, he met with the governor, and he offered to help mediate the conflict. Dismayed by the suffering that he had uncovered, Myers also organized a relief campaign among church people on behalf of the families of the striking workers. Reflecting on Myers's efforts, the Christian Century declared that Myers stood “almost alone as representative of any active concern in the churches” in the midst of “appalling industrial warfare.” Otherwise, “the forces of organized religion would have to confess to an amazing indifference when confronted by the most acute industrial conflict of the year.”

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”

Looking back at the events that led up to the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, California, the foremost revival of the century in terms of global impact, eyewitness Frank Bartleman announced that the “revival was rocked in the cradle of little Wales … ‘brought up’ in India” and then became “full grown” in Los Angeles, California. To the Pentecostal “saints,” as they commonly called themselves in America, the appearance of “Pentecostal” phenomena (for example, visions, dreams, prophecy, glossolalia, and other charismatic gifts) in India confirmed that what the Old Testament prophet Joel had foretold about the “latter rain” outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the end times (Joel 2: 28–29) was being fulfilled simultaneously in other parts of the world. As one songwriter put it, “The latter rain has come, / Upon the parched ground … The whole wide world around.”

From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel at a dangerous post … As soon as I was alone, I kneeled down, and determined not to rise, but to continue crying and wrestling with God, till He had mercy on me. How long I was in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart, “thy sins are forgiven thee.” My chains fell off; my heart was free. All guilt was gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace. I loved God and all mankind, and the fear of death and hell was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment.

In May 1951, Mennonite churchman Grant Stoltzfus profiled the rising renown of Lancaster County's sectarian groups for readers of the Lancaster-based Pennsylvania Dutchman. In his “Memorandum to Persons Interested in Disseminating Information about Mennonites and Amish and Their Way of Life,” Stoltzfus described how, in recent years, the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce had been inundated with requests for information about the county's Mennonite and Amish residents. Even more significant—and, to Stoltzfus, more unsettling—was the commerce in information that transpired outside the chamber's walls. Stoltzfus characterized what he saw being sold in Lancaster's bus station as “cheap, tawdry literature on the Amish and Mennonites,” and he complained that similar materials were available throughout southeastern Pennsylvania. Stoltzfus concluded his memo with a rhetorical question and a call to action: “Can we blame these businesses for handling [this literature] until we take some positive steps to provide something better?” Scholarly works have their place, wrote Stoltzfus, but the hour's most pressing need was the production of “some good popular pamphlets on Mennonite and Amish life.”

Some dozen years ago, I began in collaboration with David Holmes, Dewey Wallace, Charles Wallace, and others to conduct tours of houses of worship during the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History. The challenge of these tours for me gradually metamorphosed from providing basic information on dates, architectural styles, and parish history highlights—all useful enough in themselves—to reading these buildings in the broader context of the urban built environment. Churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings do not appear in the vacuum that a slide presentation or text illustration might suggest. Rather, they are in a continual mute dialogue with their surroundings, which in the urban context tend to be other buildings of commercial or civic purpose. The context is also four-dimensional. Not only do religious buildings themselves undergo expansion, remodeling, and changes in denominational identity, but their neighbors frequently change even more rapidly.