Few historians of early Christianity would dissent from the view that Hilary of Poitiers was the west's most able and articulate anti-Arian apologist of the 360s. In the course of this bishop's exile in Asia Minor (356–360) and return to the west, there is evidence of a substantial literary activity, most of which was circulated soon after his death and survives to the present day. Works such as his letters to the emperor Constantius II, expecially the so-called In Constantium, his collected dossier against Valens and Ursacius, and his theological treatises De synodis and De trinitate, attained for this once obscure bishop from Gaul a position of preeminence in the minds of the next generation of anti-Arians.

For the contemporary historian, whether male, gray-haired and ensconced in the ivory tower of an old-fashioned political or intellectual history, or female, young, and happily dismantling the tower by the seige-machine of social history, Carolingian society is a source of continuing wonderment. For those with a love of order and of the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor, Carolingian society especially in the years just preceding and following Louis the Pious's death in 840, mirrors all the anxieties of a committed band of representatives of high culture surrounded by the rising seas of low culture. For those riding the crests of the sea, Carolingian society speaks of the possibilities open in a society of little structure and much mobility to those of imagination, not tied to the past.

In the spring of 1376, Catherine, the uneducated daughter of a Sienese dyer, a simple lay Tertiary, traveled to Avignon in southern France. She wanted to speak directly with Pope Gregory XI about organizing a crusade, reforming the Catholic church, ending his war with Florence, and moving his court back to Rome. Her reputation for holiness and her orthodoxy gave her a hearing with the pope, and so her words had a measure of influence on him. Gregory did move to Rome in the fall of 1376, and he paid for her trip back to Italy. In 1377 he allowed her to lead a mission in the Sienese countryside: he wanted her presence there to help save souls and perhaps stimulate interest in a crusade. In 1378 he sent her to Florence as a peacemaker for the war between the Tuscan cities and the papacy. In late 1378 Gregory's successor Urban VI asked her to come to Rome to support his claim to the papacy against the schismatic Pope Clement VII. Finally in 1380, Catherine died in Rome, exhausted by all these endeavors.

The attempt to create a purified Dutch language and establish a Dutch cultural and linguistic identity distinct from Germanic variants became a major preoccupation of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Netherlanders. Overcoming variations in regional dialects between the central province of Holland and the northern, eastern, and southern provinces and constructing a standard unitary language for inhabitants of the Low Countries was to occupy Dutch writers for several generations. Clearly the development of a national vernacular was essential in the process of achieving cultural and political independence from the Spanish overlords during the Eighty Years War.

Only months after Luther's death in 1546, a colleague, Caspar Cruciger, Sr., published his magnum opus, an 879-page commentary on the Gospel of John, In Evangelium Iohannis Apostoli Enarratio. Cruciger's Enarratio provides an excellent angle from which scholars may examine an important shift in Wittenberg's exegesis and theology during the crucial decade of the 1540s. To be sure, this work has few of the characteristics of other treatments of the fourth Gospel produced near the same time. The exposition of the four Gospels by Cologne's Franciscan theologian, von Konigstein, underwent far more printings. The works on John by Calvin and Bullinger have attracted more attention in our own day. However, when set into the context of continued sharp debate over ecclesiology, Cruciger's commentary on John provides a critical reshaping of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method to meet the continuing challenge of defining the church in line with an emerging Lutheran orthodoxy and against Roman Catholicism. Unlike later Protestant commentaries, which often roll ponderously from one unrelated locus in theology to the next, Cruciger's work, though massive, focuses almost singlemindedly on the doctrine of the church. The commentary represents part of Wittenberg's response to failed discussions over the nature of the church and its authority which began in 1520, nearly halted in 1541 at the Colloquy of Regensburg which Cruciger attended, and collapsed with the outbreak of hostilities during the Smalcald War of 1547. It also demonstrates the farreaching effect of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method in shaping that response among his own students.