Chromatius served as bishop of Aquileia, a large trade-centered city at the north end of the Adriatic Sea, from 388–407. He interacted with notables like Rufinus, Jerome, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom, but our knowledge of Chromatius was limited to second-hand statements until the rediscovery of his sermons in the last century. When one examines the sermons in their original context, a disconnect on the issue of heresy emerges. Based on a survey of Christianities in northern Italy, it seems that the variety we might expect is lacking in the sources. An examination of the region reveals that the area during this time was remarkably homogenous in terms of the diversity among its Christian adherents. In Aquileia, Chromatius would have been unchallenged by other churches. In light of that, what did his continued tirades against non-existent “heretical” groups achieve? By examining the whole of each sermon mentioning heretics a pattern emerges surrounding the history of heresy and orthodoxy. The maintenance of institutional memory was not done sentimentally, but to advance the domination Christians had achieved into new arenas, namely, for Chromatius, control over an urban religious space which included Judaism.

The English cleric John Colet (ca. 1467–1519) composed a commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius, the legendary disciple of Saint Paul. Colet approached the Dionysian text not as an artifact belonging to another time and place but as a living document, much as he approached St. Paul's Letters in his commentaries. His goal was to critique lapses in ecclesiastical virtue and to instill a spirit of personal and institutional reform by comparing the sacramental and hierarchical practices of the sixth-century Dionysian Church with those of his Church in England. This essay suggests a new path to understanding the distinctiveness of reforms advocated by Colet. By referring to specific elements, including the practices of baptism and the eucharist and the nature of the office of bishop, Colet was able, via Dionysius, to reveal alternative possibilities of reform by adopting patristic and, although perhaps unwittingly, Eastern Orthodox thought and practice. What has not been appreciated thus far is that Colet's Ecclesiastical Hierarchy produces for a Latin readership in England a neo-Patristic blueprint that resembles in significant details the living ecclesiology of the Christian East, which was coming to light in the West through the humanist restoration of patristic texts and debates among scholars in Italy over Union and Conciliarism.

Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarce. House ascetics in cities survive for us in documentary and other sources, but women monks in non-coenobitic, nonurban environments are more difficult to locate, to the point at which some scholars have begun to question their very existence. This essay seeks to change the parameters of the scholarly debate over the nature of non-coenobitic female monastic experience. It examines hagiography, monastic rules and letters, and documentary papyri to reassess the state of the field and to produce a fuller portrait of anchoritic and semi-anchoritic female asceticism. Non-coenobitic women's monasticism existed, and it crossed boundaries of geography and social status, as well as the traditional categories of lavra, eremitic, coenobitic, and house asceticism. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights not only into women ascetics’ physical locations but also into their class, education, and levels of autonomy. An intervention into the historiography of women's asceticism in late antique Egypt, this study ultimately questions the advisability of using traditional categorizations of “anchoritic,” “lavra,” and “coenobitic” to classify female monasticism, because they obscure the particularities and diversity of female ascetic history.

In his interpretations of the books of the Hebrew Bible, written mainly in Caesarea Maritima, Origen often depicts the “letter” of scripture as a veil that covers the spiritual meaning of the text. He imagines the work of the spiritual exegete as an act of unveiling. Drawing on several biblical veils (including Moses' veil and the bride's veil in the Song of Songs), Origen constructs a hermeneutic theory that privileges a rational, spiritual, and “unveiled” interpretation of the text over a carnal, literal interpretation, which he most often associates with Jews. After examining the ancient association of veils with femininity and aidōs (shame), this article argues that Origen's consignment of Jews to a “veiled” reading functions as anti-Jewish slander insofar as it associates Jewish interpretive practices with shame, dishonor, femininity, and fleshliness. Origen's interpretation of the veil contributes to his understandings of gender, sexuality, sexual renunciation, and Christian identity. Despite Origen's rhetorical disavowal of the veil as literal, fleshly, Jewish, and feminine, a reading of his exegesis of biblical veils attests to his unrenounced desire for the “veil of the letter” and the “body” of the text.

An 1894 biography of St. Francis of Assisi was a milestone in the lives of two young urban missionaries. They were “Sisters of the People” at the dynamic and progressive Wesleyan Methodist West London Mission in Soho, a poor and overcrowded central London district. Sister Mary Neal and Sister Emmeline Pethick would eventually distinguish themselves nationally, Emmeline as a militant suffragist in tandem with her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and later as a feminist and peace activist; Mary as a music educator and folklorist. French protestant clergyman Paul Sabatier's scholarly but lyrical biography of Francis enthralled the mission's leaders, including the superintendent, Hugh Price Hughes. Francis's rejection of his family's wealth, his insistence on absolute poverty for himself and his followers, and his devotion to the poor presented a compelling model of Christian service, one that the two young Sisters found especially exciting. They resigned the Sisterhood in 1895 to live cheaply in workers' housing just north of their old turf. This decision launched them into a national community of Franciscan-inspired settlers, philanthropists, “simple livers,” and collective farmers—offering us a new perspective on fin de siècle social activism.

In the early thirteenth century, informal communities of pious lay women in urban areas of Northern Europe came to the attention of the Church. These women lived in their own homes or small communities, and played a prominent role in secular society. However, these women soon found themselves both the subject of controversy, and increasingly steered toward a monastic model. Attempts were made to create and institutionalize a “middling” status. These primarily took the form of the creation of “third orders” or “tertiary groups” attached to official religious orders. Using the example of the so-called Franciscan third order, this article explores the evolution and institutionalization of penitential life from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It both traces the evolution of the fictive Franciscan penitential order, and places it in its wider context. In so doing, it explores the norms and controversies associated with this way of life in later medieval and early modern religious culture.

This article examines the close ties that developed between Desiderius Erasmus and the Polish kingdom and the implication of these relationships on our understanding of the religious landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe. Few regions embraced Erasmus as enthusiastically as Poland, and nowhere else did he have such a concentration of allies positioned at the highest levels of society including the king himself. More than any other figure from western Europe, Erasmus helped shape the intellectual and religious agenda of the Polish kingdom during this period. A close analysis of this relationship expands our understanding of Reformation Europe in a number of critical ways. It brings Poland, normally viewed peripherally in this period, into key debates and discussions of the Reformation. Erasmus's relationship with Poland also speaks to wider issues and processes of change in the Christian world. As confessional distinctions were becoming more pronounced in the 1520s and 1530s and hope for ecclesial reunion receded, Erasmus looked to Poland as a model for Christendom. He held up the kingdom as an example of how difference could be accommodated and compromise could be reached through wise leadership in church and state.

This article aims to open up and overview some key questions surrounding the Italian Reformation. It argues that the Italian Reformation cannot be viewed as a closed book after the conclusion of the Council of Trent; instead there emerged new forms of engagement between Italy and Protestantism, both within and outside the peninsula. In particular, this article considers Protestant propaganda: the efforts by communities of exiles, especially the Genevan Italian congregation, in printing materials to send into Italy, and also sending personnel at critical junctures, all extremely sensitive to political and religious contexts. The French Wars of Religion provided an immediate model for what could be attempted in Italy, and so addressed sometimes delicate issues such as nicodemism and martyrdom, while also providing practical advice and support to Protestants in Italy. As such, this article shows that Italy was not partitioned by some religious “Iron Curtain” from the rest of Europe, but rather was still viewed as a potential battleground for international Calvinism.

For several decades, agency has been a central concept in the historical study of Christian missions, yet it remains more frequently invoked than analyzed. This article explores the formulation of evangelical protestant beliefs about human agency in the context of efforts to evangelize the world. It does so by examining the fraught relationship between a Sierra Leonean Christian missionary named Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce and the United Brethren in Christ, an American denomination that first championed and later disfellowshipped him. Wilberforce experienced a fleeting American celebrity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely because his story could be told to promote competing interpretations of African agency. This article details the temporal and spatial components of evangelical conceptions of heathenism and human agency, their use by Wilberforce, and their collision with notions of human nature grounded in scientific racism. It draws on private and public interpretations of Wilberforce's story, including his dramatic fall from favor among his evangelical supporters, to argue that historical constructions of agency informed and were shaped by missionary activity. The recovery of Wilberforce's story, and of the debates that swirled around him, advances a new way of studying the relationship between agency and Christian missions.

The purpose of this article is to examine the biblical exegesis of two seventeenth-century Dutch Remonstrant theologians, Simon Episcopius (1583–1643) and Étienne de Courcelles (1586–1659). Their hermeneutic was characterized by an emphasis on the perspicuity, or clarity, of scripture through the use of reason, combined with the marginalization of spiritual meanings in favor of the literal-grammatical sense alone. In both of these emphases, they went beyond their theological forebear, Jacob Arminius (1559–1609), and adumbrated the methods of later Enlightenment thinkers. The stress on perspicuity and authorial intention led to increasing fascination with text criticism, linguistic analysis, and historical contextualization, highly rarefied disciplines that became prerequisites for correct, scholarly biblical interpretation. This development also pushed the question of biblical fallibility closer to the center of the doctrine of scripture. As a consequence of the philological, scientific study of the Bible, biblical interpretation was relegated to the field of scholarship and doctrinal formulation to the church. The original ideal of biblical perspicuity resulted in biblical obscurity.

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

This essay compares two neglected German translations of Jonathan Edwards's famous Faithful Narrative (1737). Both were published in 1738 but by different circles of German Pietists—one Lutheran and centered around Halle, one Reformed and located in the Nether Rhine area. Both were more intimately woven into transatlantic evangelical communication networks than has been understood. Each version show that the news about the American awakening was received enthusiastically as an encouraging sign of God's advancing kingdom, a model for inner-churchly revivals, and an argument for the legitimacy of Pietist conventicles at home. Comparing the two translations also reveals how Edwards was appropriated in quite divergent ways and with varying attitudes by the two groups, reflecting their distinct regional, denominational and social contexts, as well as specific religious needs and dogmatic emphases. While both texts evince that German Pietism very much partook in the emergence of a transatlantic evangelical consciousness, they simultaneously show how the formation of such an ecumenical identity was complicated by persisting confessional and regional differences. Finally, the two German translations of Edwards's narrative illustrate that the meaning of these revivals as part of a larger Protestant evangelical awakening was negotiated not only among Anglo-American evangelicals but also among Continental Pietists.

For many years, the Religious Right has argued that Thomas Jefferson's “wall of separation” metaphor, expounded in his address to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, did not reflect his true views on cooperation between Church and State; and that he was actually a devout Christian who embraced a symbiotic relationship between them. Recent scholarship, concurring with these views, contends that Jefferson's thoughts and actions, both in political office and as a private individual, reflected his desire for government participation in religious ceremonies and his sincere dedication to the Christian faith. This article refutes such arguments. It compares Jefferson's ideas with John Adams's more orthodox opinions, particularly in their attitudes toward the connection between atheism and personal morality. The article notes that Jefferson, while endorsing Jesus' ethical teachings, also embraced philosophical materialism. He probably did not believe in an afterlife. Jefferson's most thoroughgoing rejection of organized Christianity occurred in old age, when his fading hopes for religious reform latched onto Unitarianism.

A number of years ago I spent time at the John Rylands University Library in Manchester reading the manuscript letters of lay Methodists. One of these was written on May 19, 1740 by a young single mother with two children, offering a moving account of her conversion to Charles Wesley. The writer's name was Margaret Austin. At the end of her letter, just below her signature she added an emphatic postscript that summarized her religious experience: “Awakened by the Reverend Mr. Whitefield: convicted by the Reverend Mr. Jn Wesley: Converted by the Reverend Mr. Charles; for the truth of whose doctrine in the strength of the Lord I am ready to lay down my life.”

John Locke and many others noted the vibrant political commentary emanating from the pulpit during the Glorious Revolution. Preachers from the full confessional spectrum in England, and especially in Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies, used occasional or state sermons to explain contemporary upheavals from the perspective of God's law, Natural law, and Civil law. Most surprising is the latter, clerical reference to civil history and ancient origins, which preachers used to answer contemporary questions of conquest and allegiance. Clergy revisited the origins and constitutional roots of the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scots, and Irish, and deployed histories of legendary kings and imaginary conquests to explain and justify the revolutionary events of 1688–1692. Sermons of this revolutionary era focused as much on civil as on sacred history, and sought their true origins in antiquity and the mists of myth. Episcopalian preachers, whether Church of Ireland, Scottish Episcopalian, or Church of England, seem to have been especially inspired by thanksgiving or fast days memorialized in the liturgical calendar to ponder the meaning of a deep historical narrative. Scots, Irish, and Massachusetts clergy claimed their respective immemorialism, as much as the English did theirs. But, as they re-stated competing Britannic constitutions and origin myths explicitly, they exposed imperial rifts and contradictions within the seemingly united claim of antiquity. By the beginning of the next reign and century, state sermons depended more upon reason and less upon a historicized mythic antiquity.

The religious history of World War II in the U.S. has long been dominated by the theme of pluralism. The trials of mobilization and battle fostered inter-religious cooperation. Against a backdrop of Nazi intolerance and godless communism, these collaborative experiences would, in the postwar years, help mute religious conflict and amplify a “Judeo-Christian” consensus. This framing, while compelling, has deflected attention from the distinctive modes with which religious Americans interpreted the war. The work of the National Catholic Community Service (the Catholic arm of the United Service Organizations) illustrates the ways Catholics framed the war as a religious matter. In seeking to build Catholic bridges across the separations of wartime, Catholics amplified the unique moral and spiritual means of their tradition. Two themes—sacramental presence and moral exceptionalism—dominated Catholics' efforts to Catholicize the war. Exploring these efforts reveals the religious arenas within which Catholic soldiers, war workers, and their families were invited to work out their sense of the war and their responsibilities as Catholics and Americans. The stories—often strikingly indifferent or even hostile to the pluralist “consensus”—shed new light on the war and on the history of religious difference in the U.S.

This article considers the relationship between stringent and arbitrary censorship policies and “religious freedom,” something “guaranteed” with significant qualifications by the Meiji Constitution, in pre-World War II Japan. In particular, this article explores the role of censorship in shaping the contours of acceptable religious practice by focusing on a regional Christian news monthly, the “Gunma Christian World Monthly.” Edited by Kashiwagi Gien, a rural Congregational minister, this monthly introduced a diverse range of ideas from socialism to critiques of militarism and imperialism. Kashiwagi's espousal of these ideas also made him the focus of local censors. By focusing on two occasions when Kashiwagi's spirited critiques of the state attracted the attention of local authorities, this article examines the complex and contingent process by which the state and its regional agents used legal means to manage the contours of acceptable belief in pre-World War II Japan. The relationship between Kashiwagi and the local police and prosecutors who attempted to manage and regulate “acceptable” content and, by extension, acceptable religious opinion, offers an important and hitherto unexamined site to consider the question of how religious freedom was interpreted by the state, local officials, and religionists.

During the Cold War and in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Calvinist and political fundamentalists of North America opposed the integration of American society and the extension of civil rights to African-Americans. Both were viewed as contrary to God's plan for humankind and omens for the end times. At the same time, these militant clerics spread reformed theology and eschatology to non-white societies across the globe. An important missionary field was Africa, where American and British racial mores influenced the cultural and political struggle. western, capitalistic and democratic principles, white minority-rule, and British imperialism faced African nationalism and communist aid to independence movements. Accordingly, the contrast between militant theology and liberal, modernist Protestantism was interjected into the conflict. Two American crusaders, Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis, made Africa an important battleground to defend segregation and western influence. Both pursued individual ministries and had differing theological agendas towards race. The International Council of Christian Churches, an organization that McIntire led, spread God's word to black Africans, while Hargis' Christian Crusade Against Communism worked with Rhodesia's white minority government. Their efforts provide insight into the militant theological and political crusade in North America and how they projected their Calvinist ideals into the international arena and into Africa.

Historians identify many connections between human rights and religion, including the influence of religious organizations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Protestant ecumenical movement and American Protestantism played important roles in this regard. Historical analysis has so far taken insufficient account of another contemporaneous phenomenon important in terms both of religion and of rights—the British Empire. Its authorities typically offered a “fair field” to Christian missionaries irrespective of their nationality or denomination. They might also offer protection to religious minorities. In Egypt the situation was complicated. An Islamic country and a vital part of Britain's “informal” empire in the Middle East, Egypt was also an important area of missionary activity. To Egyptian government and British imperial representatives alike missionaries asserted their right and that of Christian converts to “religious liberty.” Focusing in part on Anglican mission in Egypt, this article examines the complex interplay of empire and Anglo-American ecumenism in missionary assertion of religious freedom. It also shows how imperialism and debates about “religious liberty” in Egypt and the Middle East influenced both “universal” and Egyptian national ideas about freedom of religion up to 1956.

The rise of German academic institutions in the nineteenth century considerably altered the landscape of American higher education. American students of theology looked to Germany to develop their discipline, where they found model textbooks that gave directives in learning and piety, transforming academic and theological practice. With sensitivity to the history of the book and the history of the rich cultural traffic across the Atlantic, this article focuses on the reception in English translation of the important and widely read Swiss-German church historian Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, whose textbooks enjoyed a considerable audience in the United States by crossing ideological boundaries and unseating obdurate assumptions. By examining this reception in the United States and Britain and investigating those “transatlantic personalities” who played pivotal roles in bringing his ideas from the “Old World” to the “New,” this article demonstrates Hagenbach's lasting influence on the changing fields of history, church history, and academic theology in America. An “Atlantic” perspective on these themes offers new insights for our understanding of religion in the modern academy, the movement and translation of theological ideas in an age of steamship travel, and the surfacing of commonalities among ostensibly mismatched, if not outright conflicting, Protestant religious cultures.