Witnessing as it did the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, the year 1974 was marked by multiple conferences and publications dedicated to his life, his thought and his place in medieval intellectual history. The recently completed septicentennial also provides a useful vantage point from which to examine the current historiographical assessment of St. Thomas' influence in modern intellectual history. Aquinas scholars devoted little systematic attention to this topic in 1974, a fact which, in itself, reflects a striking and persistent imbalance within the field of Aquinas studies. It is a commonplace to state that St. Thomas enjoyed an authority in the period since the thirteenth century far exceeding any he achieved in his own day. Yet, a consideration of the historiography of Thomas' place in modern thought reveals the fact that the Angelic Doctor's substantial post-medieval reputation has not generally been matched by an equally plentiful measure of historical understanding. For two generations, historians of the Middle Ages have made great strides toward the systematic recovery of the historical Thomas Aquinas. But the task of uncovering the historical significance of his thought within the changing contexts of post-medieval culture still awaits its Grabmanns and Chenus.

Although historians have been aware that foreigners were appointed to the French episcopacy, there are no studies of the evolution of this practice as a longterm trend. Indeed, there are no studies for any particular reign. The only information on this subject is provided indirectly by articles on Italians in France. One such study asserts that the appointment of foreigners to the French episcopacy began in the thirteenth century and ended in the sixteenth century, but this is erroneous since this author has discovered that foreign appointments continued until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. This study focuses in depth on the reign of Francis I because it was during this period that the appointment of foreigners to the French episcopacy reached its apogee. We will investigate the reasons for this and will show that Francis I used ecclesiastical patronage to further the goals of an ambitious foreign policy. The characteristics of his foreign episcopal appointments will be examined along with their effects on the French church. An attempt also will be made to place this reign within the larger context of the evolution of this practice from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

Few early New England practices troubled European observers more than the attempt to restrict church membership to the regenerate. The requirement that each prospective church member give a “relation” of his experience of grace, a public declaration “of God's manner of working upon [his] soul,” won quick notoriety. In his list of sixteen questions designed to embarass the Independent party, for instance, the Dutch minister William Apollonius began by raising the issue of the qualifications of church members. “Is no one to be admitted into the communion of the external visible church,” he demanded, “unless he is endowed with the real internal holiness of regeneration and with justifying faith in Christ? Must such a person undergo a strict examination…?” Robert Baillie suggested that prospective members' obligation “to show to the whole congregation convincing signs of their regeneration” was the “capital and fundamental difference” between his position and that of the New Englanders. He and his fellow Scot Samuel Rutherford were convinced that by requiring such a test, the New England churches had so seriously deviated from traditional Christian practice that they had aligned themselves with the sectarians.

In the 1670s John Bunyan and his Nonconformist colleagues put into effect an organizational plan developed during the imprisonment years prior to 1672. The purpose of the plan was to provide a network of preachers and teachers in the local villages throughout northern Bedfordshire and contiguous areas that would be strong enough to withstand further persecution. As the plan was put into effect, it brought Bunyan into closer contact with other Nonconformists to the south and east, as far away as London. Ironically the plan was formulated when Bunyan and others were imprisoned together at Bedford for their Nonconformity. Their success vividly illustrates the failure of the Stuart government to suppress these men of faith.

Anonymity, forced or voluntary, has frequently cloaked the contributions of women to the life and thought of religious movements. Such was the case with Anne Dutton (1692–1765), an English evangelical, a “gentlewoman” who appears fleetingly in the records of the eighteenth century and only momentarily in later annals of pious women. In spite of some efforts to seek her out early in this century, Dutton has remained a relatively unknown figure in the history of English evangelicalism. In fact she was a prolific though elusive writer, credited by one source with nearly fifty distinct publications—religious pieces of diverse size and character. Anne Dutton became the friend, confidant and correspondent of many evangelical leaders and on more than one occasion directly assisted them in their pastoral activities. She was also the spirited opponent of others. This obscure, talented author defied powerful social conventions in her effort to rise above the backstage role commonly assigned to and accepted by women in the religious world of the eighteenth century.

In 1789, two months after the inauguration of George Washington as president of the “first new nation,” the foundering regime of Louis XVI, in the 802d year of Capetian rule in France, was forced to convene the Estates General. As the French crisis deepened, all of Europe was deeply stirred—and in radically diverse ways. One Sunday morning in the spring of 1791 some Tübingen University students, including the future philosophers Hegel and Schelling, were bold enough to celebrate the revolution's progress by erecting a Freedom Tree in a nearby meadow. A more characteristic response came in August of that year when the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold II, whose sister, Marie Antoinette, had recently been made a prisoner in the Tuilleries, joined the King of Prussia in the Declaration of Pillnitz. This threat of foreign intervention, in turn, awakened the French nation and brought the revolution to a new pitch of excitement. Paris soon heard for the first time the thrilling strains of La Marseillaise. While a citizens army marched off against the forces of Reaction, the newly elected delegates to a constitutional convention made their way to Paris. Then on 20 September 1792, the very day on which the Convention proclaimed the Year One of the French Republic, the Prussian march on Paris was gloriously halted at the battle of Valmy in the Argonne near Belgium.

It is almost a truism that when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species first appeared, in 1859, many people found its evolutionism to be unacceptable for religious reasons. They thought the theory of natural selection working by random variations conflicted with long-held and cherished beliefs about God and His relationship with man and the world. But although the general fact of the religious opposition to Darwinism is well-known, precise questions about the nature of the opposition—if indeed there was total opposition—have yet to be answered fully The present article seeks to go some way towards the asking and answering of such questions, although the discussion will keep to relatively sophisticated thinkers who took both science and religion seriously, and who were therefore concerned to achieve some harmony between the two. It will not deal with those who cared only for either science or religion.