Twenty-first-century scholarship on the late medieval Dominican mystic Henry Suso has seen a marked interest in gendered explorations of his Vita in the realms of authorship, authority, and social and religious prescriptions. In particular, the position of the nun Elsbeth Stagel, Suso's longtime friend, mentee, and narrative subject in the Vita, has come to the forefront as a site of contestation. Moreover, Suso's portrayal of the monastic life as one of a knightly contest has challenged the meaning and function of his work as a didactic text for women religious, as chivalric themes typically carry certain gendered presuppositions. I argue that, contrary to the interpretation of the Vita as opposed to female emulation of the Servant, a close reading of the work suggests that the Servant not only allowed but encouraged Stagel and, by extension, Dominican nuns in Suso's care, to don the persona of a knight for Christ, thus broadening the spiritual imaginations of his readers beyond traditional gendered conventions.

Liturgy has often served as a source for studying the identities of medieval religious communities through examining local saints and special chants or ceremonies. This article deepens such approaches by considering the practice of liturgical coordination, which required each convent to reconcile the obligations imposed upon it by the order to which it belonged, the diocese in which it lay, and the personal networks of its sisters. The shifting dates of the Easter cycle created a wide variety of possible calendrical conflicts and necessitated that each convent's liturgical practice be organized anew every year. Focusing on German-language liturgical manuals from Observant Dominican convents, this article introduces these sources and examines the various obligations, authorities, and sources of advice that Dominican sisters coordinated when planning each year's liturgy. It then turns to the concrete example of a major calendrical conflict on May 1, 1519, which illustrates how convents negotiated their networked obligations and defended their decisions. Supplementing traditional sources such as chronicles and charters, liturgical administrative documents reveal how each convent's liturgical identity was both iterative and networked and how the tensions between these features opened up spaces for assertive decision-making.

In a 1683 sermon, Benjamin Calamy, an Anglican priest, claimed that the separation of Dissenters from the Church of England was unjustifiable. Thomas Delaune, a London Baptist schoolmaster, responded in A Plea for the Non-Conformists (1684), which compared seventeenth-century Dissenters to sixteenth-century Reformers who had escaped from the “Church of Rome.” The Restoration authorities judged the book to be a seditious libel, for which Delaune was arrested, tried, and imprisoned in Newgate, where he was soon joined by his poverty-stricken wife and two children. By 1685, the whole family had perished in Newgate. This tragic story guaranteed Delaune's status as a martyr for generations of Nonconformists. Indeed, the Plea achieved amongst Dissenters the reputation of an “unanswerable” text. Its enduring appeal transcended denominational and geographical boundaries. This paper explores the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of the Plea, which Dissenters, both in England and America, repurposed for various politico-theological circumstances. Throughout the eighteenth century, Dissenters invoked the Plea against perceived cases of episcopal tyranny. By the pluralistic nineteenth century, however, this external, episcopal threat had largely been replaced with an internal one, prompting Dissenters to deploy the Plea against corruption and lethargy within their own denominations.

This paper argues that childbirth served as a prism for religious experience in early America, not just among the women who experienced it but also among the members of their households and communities. Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the social and physiological dimensions of early American spirituality by illuminating a religious culture of childbearing that shaped the piety of anyone who came into contact with it. We might expect that childbirth molded women's spirituality. But this article proposes that not just women but also others in their midst experienced religion differently because of their proximity to childbirth. Pregnancy, labor, and infant loss forced women and men to confront mortality and became means through which they carved out spiritual life, created ritual, and forged religious community. Using the body as a category of analysis, this paper reveals a space where the physical and spiritual persons intersect, and it argues that spiritual responses to childbirth as a physiological event were part of the longer arc of religious experience than we have previously appreciated. In doing so, it offers new ways to center women and gender in the narrative of early American religious history.

J.A.F. Gregg, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, played an important role in religious life across the island of Ireland for half of the twentieth century. He has been portrayed by historians as the “Marble Arch,” a leader who reigned over one Church across two states. This article reevaluates that interpretation: by using the period of the Second World War as a case study, it suggests that the historiographical portrayal of Gregg has neglected other significant aspects of his character and career. This article contends that, in addition to being a dominant leader, he was a British patriot, a pastor, and a scholar. Gregg navigated a course that recognized both states and their differing positions regarding the conflict; and he contributed to post-war desires for unity among Irish Anglicans across those states during a period of increased division on the island. The article, by bringing fresh attention to Gregg, discusses an under-examined figure in the history of the Church of Ireland and explores a hitherto neglected period in that historiography. By contextualizing Gregg's wartime rhetoric with that of Anglican churchmen in England, the study also addresses lacunae both in the historiography of religion and the Second World War and in that of Irish and Northern Irish experiences of the conflict.

By introducing different types of sources—published documents on Vatican's Eastern policy, archival material of the Soviet governmental agencies, egodocuments of local ecclesiastical leaders—this article tries to identify the role Lithuanian subjects have played in the field of Vatican-USSR relations during the first half of Pope John Paul II's pontificate. The research reveals that, since the end of 1970s, issues pertaining to the Lithuanian Catholic Church were considered priority agenda items—both within the halls of the Vatican and in the central government offices of the Soviet regime. An analysis of available sources illustrates also that interrelated issues of the boundaries of the Vilnius Archdiocese and the question of its further administration constituted the most acute node of issues during the period under review. The Soviet regime was the most interested in focusing on these issues, as it hoped thereby to dispel any mutual sympathies between Lithuanian Catholics and the Polish pope, put a stop to the emerging cooperation between Catholics in Lithuania and Poland, and bring an end to the politically costly case of Bishop Steponavičius, who by then had become a symbol of the Lithuanian Catholic Church's resistance. Suppressing of any attempts of the Holy See to be represented at commemoration of important events in Lithuania's history was yet another highly complicated task for the Soviet authorities.