Adam Smith argued that, as the monopoly provider of religious services, the medieval Church represented a formidable impediment to economic development. How did the Church maintain its monopoly; and how did that monopoly break down in the Reformation? Further, given that the secular lords had a substantial comparative advantage in violence relative to the Church, how did the Church maintain its power? In addressing these questions, Smith developed a rich and systematic approach to the incentives, institutions, and competition surrounding the medieval Church.

This chapter considers the treatment of religion in Puccini’s operas, with a strong focus on the two works with particular ecclesiastical themes, Tosca and Suor Angelica. It shows how Puccini drew upon the example of earlier models of religious representation in opera, by composers including Boito and Verdi. It considers the changing relationship between the Church and the state during Puccini’s lifetime, and the ongoing (though evolving) role of censorship laws. The use of liturgical scenes by Puccini and his contemporaries within the giovane scuola is discussed, with close analysis of stock techniques that are employed. The author concludes that Puccini’s works are made particularly effective by their habit of contrasting the secular and the sacred, using a more nuanced characterisation than is found in the works of his contemporaries.

The chapter analyzes how frequent- and infrequent-churchgoing youth understand their citizenship identities and obligations at the local and national levels. Both frequent and infrequent churchgoers highlight communal aspects of citizenship, but frequent churchgoers stress citizenship as faith-inspired actions such as prayer and reciprocal ties in church communities. Frequent churchgoers view citizenship as acts that build the nation, though this citizen goal often has a distinctly Christian tenor. Frequent churchgoers use more legalistic language than infrequent churchgoers and display more political efficacy. Afrobarometer findings confirm that more religious involvement relates to higher political activism, but our respondents illustrate that youth agents at times contest religious leaders’ political messaging and question those leaders’ integrity. Case studies from a renewalist church in Ghana and a mainline Protestant South African leadership program illustrate how youth adapt political messaging as they craft their own citizen identities.

Sarah Mortimer examines the impact of the Reformation on thinking about the human commonwealth within the Christian temporal and historical scheme of the Fall. From the outset Protestants sought to integrate the civil and the divine, pursuing the ideal of the godly commonwealth, while Catholics would align the commonwealth with natural law, distinct from the divine law which gave the Church its authority. With the hardening of confessional divisions, these differences were accentuated: Protestants appealed directly to Scripture for political guidance, while leading Catholics emphasised that priests and worship were essential to all forms of society. But there were also those such as Jean Bodin who sought to understand politics independently of the Christian story; others, including Francisco Suárez, began to analyse human relationships using the hypothesis of a state of nature with neither sin nor grace. These attempts to stretch and even hypothetically step outside the scheme of the Fall in turn informed the thinking of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the chapter ends with an extended assessment of his reflections on the relation between commonwealth and churches, and his increasing acceptance of diversity in the civil sphere.

This chapter considers Matthew’s depiction of Jesuss application of temple and priestly imagery to himself and to his followers, with special attention to the scene of the commissioning of Peter in Matthew 16. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants and other overlooked traditions that are suggestive of priestly and cultic imagery are also analyzed.

The combination of violent crimes, gruesome and prolonged execution spectacles, and natural disasters created an atmosphere of tension and fear in late 1780s Mexico City. Scientists of the era identified the flaming clouds that Gómez described above as an aurora borealis. But most people in this era would not have read these scientific interpretations. Instead, shocking natural phenomena prompted a turn to their faith in the supernatural for explanations and remedies. This reaction drew from both European and Indigenous connections between the divine and the physical world. Gómez himself communicated a sense of the ineffable links between human acts and natural phenomena (perhaps caused by unseen supernatural entities) in the first quote by juxtaposing an earthquake with the execution of five men. The skepticism of the European Enlightenment did not diminish the Novohispanic belief in miracles.

Moving away from the quantitative approach of Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 considers service magicians’ social position. The chapter begins by exploring the official stance towards magic and magicians over the period: what sort of archetypal image is painted by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and how this changed over the centuries. This (overwhelmingly negative) characterisation acts as a point of comparison against popular attitudes towards service magic, and treatment of wizards in reality. The second section considers magicians living in London and uses their domiciliary location as a lens to look at how they lived and practised. Through this approach we see that most practitioners, though living on the edge of the city, were nevertheless carefully positioned to be as accessible to their client base as possible. Further investigation of court records and popular media (primarily plays) of the time demonstrates that service magicians were a recognised, even occasionally celebrated, part of London life. This leads to a conclusion that magic was broadly accepted in wider society, at least in an urban context.

The debate surrounding the ‘degradation’ (removal of degrees) of the Revd William George Ward by fellow graduates of Oxford University in February 1845 raised fundamental questions: Who teaches the true faith and on what authority? This chapter focuses upon two means of communication that came to the fore in response to the Ward case, which was more to do with theological beliefs and principles than liturgical practices: first, the almost daily exchange of private letters between key individuals, enabling anxieties to be expressed and party tactics worked out; and second, the printing of pamphlets, often in the form of open letters, which provided a means by which more fully developed arguments could be circulated rapidly. Once again, the communication revolution associated with the uniform penny post and the expansion of the railways changed the pace of events and of the exchange of ideas. Opposing sides in the battle for votes in the Ward case shared drafts of pamphlets by post, offered moral support to colleagues and vented strong emotions on ecclesiastical matters that meant the world to them.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

“The Longest Day in Graignes,” recounts the three German assaults on the village on 11–12 June. The paratroopers rebuffed the numerically superior enemy, until they ran out of ammunition. The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division also employed heavy guns, including artillery, against the village. The Germans damaged the twelfth-century Romanesque Church. Once they seized the center of the village, the SS troops proceeded to murder the village priest, Father Albert Le Blastier, and his aides for tending to wounded Americans. The Nazi troops terrorized other villagers. The Nazis also executed nineteen US prisoners, many of whom had been wounded in action. The length of the battle held the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division back from its central mission, namely the recapture of the strategically vital port town of Carentan.

This essay argues that Simone Weil and her early editors fashioned her as a modern iteration of the medieval mystics, replicating a key feature of the archive of medieval women’s mystical writing: the construction of medieval women’s textual afterlives by male clerics. Though scholars have often observed parallels between Weil and the medieval mystics, the ways in which Weil and her editors effect this parallel have not been thoroughly explored. Weil and her editors constructed her as a Christian mystic – drawing both on contemporary discussions of the topic, and on the archive of medieval mysticism for points of comparison – in a distinctly modern sense of the term, as it was coming to be understood in twentieth-century France. Together, they transform her image much as the advisors and amanuenses of the medieval mystics did in transmitting their works into modernity.

This section provides the main argument of the book, followed by historical background on the development of doctrine and devotion to the Virgin Mary up to the end of the fifth century and the flourishing of the cult from that period onward. This section is followed by one on literary genre, which attempts to justify the structure and argument of the book as a whole. A section on gender, which takes into account recent approaches to this subject in the Byzantine context, develops a methodology for studying the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Introduction finishes by outlining once again the goal of this study: it is to assess early and middle Byzantine texts on the Byzantine Virgin according to the diverse settings and audiences for which these were intended.

The chapter outlines the biographical context of 1848, when Denmark underwent a revolution and its Church was reconstituted. In 1848 Kierkegaard felt himself at a turning point in his own life: He was looking back at his difficult childhood and Christian upbringing and considering his professional future. The same year was also a turning point in his relationship to the Danish State Church and its head, Bishop Mynster. Having declared an end to his authorship, Kierkegaard was trying to decide how to express his developing views and how far he should go in his critique of the Church. From a literary point of view, The Sickness unto Death signaled the increasing prominence of the genre of the religious discourse, while from a theological point of view it shows Kierkegaard drawing closer to the ideal of imitating Christ. At the same time, The Sickness unto Death presents his mature philosophical position, in continuity with his earlier works, consolidated in his analysis of the human being’s spiritual condition and the ideal of faith as “resting transparently in God.” The personal, philosophical, and professional questions underlying The Sickness unto Death caused a long delay in its publication; these questions were eventually resolved by the invention of a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.

This chapter introduces the setting and context of the narrative. The Low Countries were a heavily urbanized corner of Europe situated at the delta of several of the continent’s major river systems. The region was economically prosperous, thanks to well-developed systems of trade, manufacturing and agriculture. Its three million inhabitants were linguistically and ethnically diverse and ranged from high-ranking nobles to middling business to hardscrabble farmers. The region was divided economically between an urban, commercial, maritime west and a rural, agricultural east. Political power was local and decentralized, although the Habsburg dynasty, especially Charles V, was engaged in an ongoing effort to centralized and consolidate their dynastic power at the expense of local nobles and city governments. The chapter also describes the vibrant state of late medieval Christianity in the region, including lay enthusiasm for devotional practice and the emergence of Christian humanism.