Anglo-Saxonist Allen Frantzen, addressing fellow medievalists in 1993, dismissed fears expressed by female colleaguesthat adopting the designation “gender studies” would signal a reinstatement of “familiar male canons while crowding hard-won courses on women writers out of the curriculum.” Such a regression, Frantzen retorted, was “inconceivable,” since “a return to a prefeminist curriculum is as likely in most universities as a resurgence of the electric typewriter.”

The historiography of Judaism in the rabbinic period (together with its implications for the history of Christianity) had been, until quite recently, founded on the assumption that the kind of historical information that rabbinic legends could yield was somehow directly related to the narrative contents that they displayed, which were understood as more or less reliable depending on the critical sensibility of the scholar. This scholarship was not, of course, generally naïve or pious in its aims or methods. A recurring question within such research had to do with the question of the credibility of a given text or passage of rabbinic literature or the recovery of its “historical kernel.” For the method or approach that I take up, all texts are by definition equally credible, for the object of research is the motives of the construction of the narrative itself, that is taken to attest to the political context of its telling or retellingrather than to the context of the narrative's content. All texts inscribe the social practices within which they originate, and many also seek to locate the genealogy of those social practices in a narrative of origins, producing a reversal of cause and effect. This reversal is a mode of narration that is particularly germane to the project of replacing traditional patterns of belief and behavior (“We have always done it this way”) with new ones that wish nevertheless to claim the authority, necessarily, of hoary antiquity—in short, to the invention of orthodoxies.

The great pearl of Reformed piety, assurance of salvation, eluded Richard Rogers, Essex presbyterian activist, in theearly 1580s. Rogers “languished long” in “unsettledness in my life” “untill wofull experience” drove him to search out a more reliable method of obtaining a steady assurance. He decided that only a steady, highly reflective, and rigorous course of life could keep assurance constant. To that end, Rogers devised “a more certain manner of direction for me through the daie and the weeke.” His new method combined continual selfreminders of God's blessings with strict activities of piety and selfscrutiny, and through it, he found the settled peace he had been seeking.

Religious conversion is undoubtedly one of the most-explored aspects of medieval and early modern social history. Thefact that the literature concerning that problem is still significantly on the increase proves its scholarly importance. The subject has found a permanent place among works dealing with denominational relations in pre-partition Poland, and the list of such works is substantial. Theyshow a significant number of dispersed pieces of information con-cerning reconversions to the Catholic Church, with no lack of more general observations on this matter.

There is a wealth of literature on Victorian religious doubt, and much of it is structured by implicitly defining pure faith in the context of nineteenth-century England as an organized, traditional, orthodox, trinitarian, and supernatural version of Christianity and then herding together people who deviate from this ideal at various points into vague categories such as “unbelief,” “infidelity,” “irreligion,” “honest doubt,” or “freethought.” Members of the numerically impressive group which is thereby constructed are then said to represent a strong trend that is given labels such as “the Victorian crisis of faith,” “the loss of faith,” or “secularization.” Much of this historiography is imbued with a Whig interpretation: these figures are seen as part of an inevitable movement toward the abandonment of religious beliefs by thinking people in the modern age as they progressed toward a more credible worldview. Indeed, the considerable attention that is paid to such people in the literature despite the fact that the Victorian age is often simultaneously declared to have been an extraordinarily religious one seems to be tacitly justified on the grounds that, although these figures may have been out of step with thespiritual confidence of their own generation, they were in step with the march of truth. The rhetoric of “honest doubt” is often tinged with the notion that a full appreciation of the fruits of modern thought and scientific inquiry would almost automatically lead to the abandonment of religious views; it is not just “honest” in the senseof candidly avowed and not derived from unworthy motives, but, rather, it is as if an “honest” examination ofthe facts could lead only to religious doubt. A contention of this study is that these interpretative tendencies have obscured a notable and telling countervailing pattern.

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.