At the beginning of the fourth century the Roman aristocracy was, for the most part, pagan in its religious attitude. By the end of that century the aristocracy had undergone what Peter Brown has described as a “sea change”: its pagan values had become redefined within the context of Christianity. This “drift into respectable Christianity” was the result of the process of socialization in the households of the Roman senatorial class over several generations. Brown suggests that the fourth-century Christianization of the aristocracy was the achievement of those upper-class Roman women who, by continuing to practice their Christian religion in the households of their pagan husbands, established the syncretistic milieu which would influence the religious attitudes of the next generation. But the apparent calm of Brown's anonymous culture-bearers is disturbed by a small group of women whose religious extremism delineates them sharply from their peers. Rejecting wholly the society into which they were born, they fled the cloying Roman atmosphere for the harsh air of the desert. The “respectable Christianity” that Rome was adopting offered them no satisfaction.

In 1968 the first volume of a monumental publishing enterprise came from the press, Herder's Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. The editor, the late Engelbert Kirschbaum, S.J., had planned the work to embrace six volumes, 1 to 4 dealing with general Christian themes, and 5 and 6 dealing with saints and other holy persons. The scope of the latter part, however, has subsequently been expanded, with the consequence that instead of two volumes, four will be needed to deal in a more comprehensive way with the saints that are to be included. (At the time of this writing three of these four volumes have been published.)

The historian of American religion seeking to establish the relevance of his specialty to the event of 1776 labors under something of a handicap, a disability epitomized in the cold silence about religion in those documents which have become the secular scriptures of the nation's political faith. Neither the official justification for the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, nor the popular contemporaneous one, Paine's Common Sense, accords the remotest of influences to formal religion. If the Revolution had a religious dimension, evidence for it must be sought elsewhere. Both the exegete, hoping to throw new light upon old truth, and the skeptic, to whom a received dogma is a standing challenge, have perforce turned to the antiquarian's shelves, stuffed with the literary remains of a pamphleteering age.

The interest of the Laurentian schism, which broke out on the death of Pope Anastasius II in November 498, lies not in any doctrinal content but rather in the tensions with Rome that it reveals and the contribution it made to papal ideology and historiography by the propaganda it stimulated. The papal break with Constantinople in 483, the Acaian schism, has been advanced as an external factor in the schism because it caused many of the senatorial nobility of German-ruled Italy to look back with nostalgia toward the Empire and to oppose papal stands on doctrine. Furthermore, senatorial discontent did not die down during the pontificates of the masterful and contentious Gelasius (492–496) or the weaker Anastasius 11(496–498) who, the caput senatus Festus assured the Emperor, would be brought to sign the Henotikon. Attention has been directed towards the internal roots of the schism, among them the late-developing interest of senators in church affairs, specifically through their claims to influence in papal elections and over church revenues, drawn for the most part from endowments from their own class and families, just as a century earlier their predecessors had sought to retain control over the revenues of the pagan cults. These claims had been put forward on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483 at a meeting of the senate with a group of bishops under the presidency of the praetorian prefect Basilius but they had been rejected once by Gelasius, an opponent of several senatorial traditions and a reorganizer of the church's property administration, and again by Symmachus in March 502.1

The national church of Armenia has enjoyed an autonomous status within the community of Christian churches since the late fourth century. At that time King Pap broke its ties with Caesarea of Cappadocia, the city in which Gregory the Illuminator, the apostle of Armenia, had received his mandate and consecration. Thereafter the hierarchy of the church was chosen within the nation according to its own rules. The head of the church, the catholicos, was the chief bishop of the Armenians and, like the kingship, the catholicate became an hereditary office according to a custom established by Gregory himself.

“Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation.” Since in his recent article Peter Brown is himself offering an explanation, we need to ask whether he has relaxed one grip only to fasten on another. Brown's analysis is characteristically brilliant. With a few deft strokes he outlines where scholarship is and what culs-de-sac it has got itself into, and he focuses attention on aspects of the evidence that have been insufficiently appreciated. Brown is peculiarly sersitive to the nature of religion, and as a result his article is an excellent account of the complex dynamics of religion in early Byzantium.

Ebenezer Devotion was born into the family of a Congregational minister in Suffield, Connecticut (then Massachusetts), on May 8, 1714, graduated from Yale College in 1732, and on October 22, 1735 was installed as the first pastor of the Third Ecclesiastical Society in Windham (later Scotland), Connecticut.1 His active ministry began about the time that Jonathan Edwards' parishioners in Northampton were first sensing that all was not right with their souls, and five short years before Whitefield and the great revival would sweep through New England. Ebenezer Devotion died on July 16, 1771 as another consuming excitement, this one political, took shape in America.

It is well known that the spokesmen for the early Christian church were hostile to religious images.1 They regarded the Old Testament prohibition against images (Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 5:8) as binding upon Christians.2 But even though Christian apologists like Clement of Alexandria and Origen cited the authority of this prohibition,3 they defended the aniconic worship of Christians from pagan attack by borrowing heavily from pagan writers. The arguments they borrowed portrayed the cult of images as a ridiculously inappropriate form of worship, one that degraded the very gods it sought to honor by likening them to base material, shaped by mere craftsmen.4

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them.

In 1894 Heinrich Denifle showed conclusively that the official textbook of masters in theology in the medieval university was the Bible. At one time historians commonly assumed that masters in theology lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a most subtle and thought-provoking book. There are so many medieval commentaries on the Sentences, both published and unpublished, and so many great masters did in fact comment on the Sentences that it was easy enough to assume that this was the set text for masters in the universities. Today there can be no doubt. Normally only bachelors lectured on the Sentences before being promoted to the rank of master. Once the young man became a master in sacred theology, he was not allowed to lecture on the Lombard. His task was to lecture on the sacred scriptures, and his official title was magister in sacra pagina, Master of the Sacred Page.

November! gloomy Month! approaches fast,

When Liberty was doom'd to brethe [sic] her last,

All, all her Sons agree to fast that Day,

To mourn, lament and sigh, and hope,—and pray

That the Almighty god of all below,

Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show1.

With these lines an anonymous American poet addressed the first day of November 1765, the date the Stamp Act was to take effect throughout British North America. The hopes of patriots and lovers of liberty, he argued, rested upon the interposition of God on behalf of the American colonies. If the Lord would look with mercy on his afflicted people and come to their aid, their freedoms could yet be preserved. In assigning the continuation of American liberty to the intervention and protection of divine providence, this patriotic poet employed one of the deepest and most popular strands of American thought expressed during the era of the American Revolution.

The ecciesiological problem posed by the authority of the pope in the Roman church is almost as old as the church itself. Likewise, the bases for the exercise of authority by the pope have long been a matter of dispute not only among churchmen but also among scholars. However, it can be stated with certainty that during the most critical years in papal history, the period from the mid-eleventh to the late fourteenth centuries, the papacy gained, and then lost, a considerable measure of leadership in western Europe. Most of the gains came as the popes affirmed what they interpreted to be their spiritual prerogatives—mention may be made, for example, of the priestly power to judge a penitent even if that penitent were a German emperor or a king of England—in a world which called its states regni Christianissimi and imperii Christianorum and assigned to its rulers similarly religious appellations.1 The losses resulted from an increasing secularization of the affairs of state and from a loss of the urgency once attendant upon the appeals and protestations of the papacy.2

Two statements written prior to 1642 have suggested the title of this piece. The first statement comes during the spring of 1623 from Joseph Mead, a Cain- bridge University don and newsletter correspondent. In a letter Mead says he has observed three sorts of puritans:

First a Puritan in politicks, or the Politicali Puritan, in matters of State, liberties of people, prerogatives of sovereigns, etc. Secondly An Ecclesiasticall Puritan, for the Church Hierarchie and ceremonies, who was at first the onely Puritan. Thirdly A Puritan in Ethicks or moral Puritan sayd to consist in singularity of living, and hypocrisie both civil! and religious which may be called the vulgar Puritan, and was the second in birth and hath made too many ashamed to be honest.

The German women's movement, like so much else that was progressive in modern German history, had its origins during the decade culminating in the revolution of 1848. An important and neglected source of German feminism may be found in the radical separatist congregations which appeared in both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant communions during those years. Historical interest in early German feminism has centered almost exclusively on Louise Otto-Peters, partly because of her extraordinary contribution and partly because her personal involvement gives continuity to the women's movement, linking the activities of the 1840s with the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein in 1865, the association which signals the birth of the modern campaign for women's rights in Germany. Religious radicalism on the other hand was stifled in all of its organized manifestations during the reaction of the 1850s. Little survived to remind future feminists of its seminal importance to their cause. Yet Louise Otto-Peters herself felt that the nonconforming religious movement offered the single most important manifestation of female emancipation in pre-revolutionary Germany.

Georg Major was a reluctant controversialist. External events and his own theological concerns forced him into a controversy which he loathed but to which he gave his name, the “Majoristic controversy.” That controversy forced Luther's heirs to refine their definition of the relationship between faith and works, but it also wracked and plagued Georg Major's life for a quarter of a century in spite of his efforts to work his way out of the dispute.

John Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement in England, was a significant figure to the unenfranchised lower class of English society. His movement roused popular spiritual and religious fervor among groups not reached by the bulk of the Anglican clergy, and he was in a position to observe and communicate with the English people in a way few others were. Many Anglicans had initially feared the Methodists as secret Jesuits or supporters of a Stuart restoration, but much of the violent opposition had declined by the 1760s. Still, little would be needed to revive action opposition to Methodist activities. It is in this connection that Wesley's activities in the era of the American Revolution should be viewed1

Though historians of religion in the United States have long recognized the importance of Mormonism, scholarly studies such as those by Mario De Pillis, Marvin Hill, and Louis Reinwand have only begun to explain the church's meaning and attraction. As a recent scholar of American religious history has argued,

the exact significance of this great story persistently escapes definition.…One cannot even be sure if the object of our consideration is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.…[The Mormons] remain people apart.…Their inner intellectual and spiritual problems cannot easily be shared with others.

It has been almost exiomatic to speak of Charles G. Finney as the religious spokesman for “the Age of Jackson,” and to see the optimistic view of man supposedly inherent in Finney's “new measures” revivalism as the religious equivalent of the Jacksonian faith in the worth and dignity of the common man. Finney's ablest interpreter, William G. McLoughlin, has contended that “Finney and Jackson, each in his own way, were striving for much the same kind of free, individualistic, and equalitarian society.” Expanding upon this contention, McLoughlin viewed the “‘revolutionary’ theology and revival measures” of Charles G. Finney as a congenial and compatible counterpart of the more general political, social, and intellectual revolution of Jacksonian America.

Patriots at the beginning of the American Revolution were conscious of participating in a tradition of liberty derived from their Puritan forefathers. Not only did they refer back to the crossing of the sea by their ancestors who “bravely threw themselves upon the bosom of the ocean, determined to find a place in which they might enjoy their freedom, or perish in the glorious attempt,” but they also spoke of themselves as “the descendants of Oliver Cromwell's army,” “the descendants of Cromwell's elect.” Benjamin Rush thought of himself as being a son of liberty genetically when he wrote, “I am the great grandson of an officer John Rush who fell fighting against King Charles 1st under Oliver Cromwell.”2

King James I's reign was a landmark in the history of the Anglican Church. His religious settlement included the codification of the canons which gave definition and cohesion to the church and reformed her adminstrative machinery. But this touched off a pamphlet war as puritan propaganda sought to force a reappraisal of the settlement. They alleged that bishops harassed and deprived hard-working, conscientious, loyal clergymen who merely rejected the ceremonies. The bishops employed young apologists to discredit the opposition and plead for conformity. They claimed that only thirty to sixty puritan clerics were deprived.