The Black Death arrived in southern France, at Marseille, in January 1348. It then spread westward, reaching Carcassonne by February and Perpignan by March. There is no exact chronology of the outbreak of the plague in Montpellier. However, the disease probably appeared by March 1348, since it spread along trade routes and the town was considerably closer to Marseille than both Carcassonne and Perpignan. The recorded toll of the Black Death in Montpellier at first seems great enough to account for any changes in the behavior of the population in the plague year. For this commercial and financial capital of Lower Languedoc, 1348 was generally termed “lan de la mortalidat.”

When Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, regained his ducal throne in May of 1534, he immediately took steps to institute the Reformation in Württmberg. Probably because of his own divided loyalties, he asked both Lutherans and Swiss-Reformed Protestants to come to Württemberg. From the outset, however, their mutual opposition, combined with determined Roman Catholic resistance in some areas, led to difficulties beyond Ulrich's expectations. The ducal commissioners for the Reformation in the southern half of Württemberg was Ambrosius Blarer, the reformer of Constance and a firm ally of both Martin Bucer and Zurich. Part of his responsibility was the University of Tübingen, a center of particularly strong Roman Catholic opposition to the Reformation. Blarer appealed to Duke Ulrich for assistance, asking for the Basel Greek scholar Simon Grynaeus, another Swiss partisan. Ulrich, however, took far more dramatic steps to reform the University of Tübingen. Under instructions from Ulrich, Chancellor Knoder and Erhard Schnepff, Blarer's counterpart in northern Württemberg, wrote to Philip Melanchthon, requesting that he return to his homeland to teach in the University of Tübingen, his alma mater.

It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation.

In the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (entry for Tuesday, August 17) Boswell relates that at a meeting with Dr Johnson the poet Blacklock spoke “with apparent uneasiness” about uncertainty in morals and religion.

In 1896 Andrew D. White published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a work which had consumed his scholarly passion for twenty years. His original interest in the subject stemmed from his difficulties, while President of Cornell, with Protestant sectarian critics. During those years, he answered opponents somewhat guardedly in lectures and letters to religious publications, but at the same time he began research on what he hoped would he his magnum opus, a work to demonstrate the futility of attempts by religious advocates to prohibit scientific inquiry and to defend essential Christian truths. “I wish the clergy to read it,” he told historian George Lincoln Burr, “and if they like to attack it, and no university on my shoulders.”