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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”