Any historical period called “late” is headed for interpretive trouble, and one called “late medieval” is probably doomed. Periodization is an artifice, as we know, yet also an art. Historians have entirely reconceived “late antiquity” over the past generation, transforming Roman decadence into an imperial and Christian culture three centuries long embracing the whole Mediterranean world, creative in its culture and foundational for societies that followed. But what of “late medieval”? In most textbooks the term comes paired still with “decline.” Humanists and Reformers first created the artifice of a “middle time,” a dismissive gesture toward the thousand years that separated them from the golden ages of antiquity and/or the early church. Nineteenth-century scientific historians introduced art into this artifice by dividing that amorphous millennium into semi-coherent sub-periods: “early” (400–1000), “high” (1000–1300), and a rump called “late” (1300–1500). Church history entered importantly into the characterizations, with the “late” period traditionally told as a series of catastrophes beginning with destructive confrontations between Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) and King Philip the Fair. The storyline for the two centuries that followed, whether treated as deepening darkness (traditional) or as an overripe autumn (Huizinga), depended on what came before and after. Early in the twentieth century, church historians introduced ecumenical and even ironic reversals: Catholic scholars, looking to their own reforms, conceded late medieval deviance and the need sometimes for reform; Protestant scholars, looking to a reform born of strength rather than decline, found a late Middle Ages full of flourishing religiosity and even modernizing initiatives. Others, skeptical of the Reformation as marking any decisive turn toward modernity (vs. Hegel), delighted in finding all manner of cults, relics, prophecies, and zealots still among these new Protestants. Oberman and McGinn by contrast have reconceived the fields of theology and mysticism, Huizinga's autumnal evanescence becoming a golden harvest. All the same—and this only a bit overstated—many Reformation histories still essentially start the world anew in the 1520s, now speaking German, and too many medieval histories still close their story with fourteenth-century “decline,” an apocalyptic onslaught of plague, revolt, schism, and war.

Elisabeth of Spalbeek (fl. 1246–1304) was one of the mulieres religiosae who flourished in the Low Countries during the thirteenth century. Although she is known today almost exclusively for her stigmata and her performance of Christ's Passion, I will argue that she provides an exceptional example of the spiritual networking described by scholars such as John Coakley and Anneke Mulder-Bakker. As they have shown, medieval holy women—recluses and anchoresses included—functioned only within tightly woven spiritual networks that connected other mulieres religiosae, sympathetic clerics, and powerful nobles who provided economic and political support in return for the women's prayers and spiritual authority. No one has analyzed Elisabeth's network in this light in part because the chief source for her life—the text written by Abbot Philip of Clairvaux, who visited Elisabeth in 1266/7—omits the proper names of most people surrounding Elisabeth and fails to mention many of the people with whom she must have come in contact. In addition, major documents concerning Elisabeth have, until now, escaped any collective analysis, so we have been unable to place Elisabeth in any context. Through a painstaking review of all the pertinent documents, however, I have succeeded in uncovering Elisabeth's political and spiritual alliances, allowing me to study her in her milieu and to provide a detailed analysis of her possible secular and religious influence. I argue that she was actively engaged in building and extending her own network, and in my consideration of the evidence for this “politics of mysticism,” I offer a perspective on Elisabeth that has led me to reinterpret her role in the last recorded event of her life, the French court battle between Queen Marie of Brabant and the chamberlain Pierre de la Broce.

In 1754, the Scottish minister John Gillies (1712–1796) published a collection of historical accounts concerning “remarkable periods of the success of the Gospel.” Its composer was a spider in a web of correspondents in Europe and North America who believed they were living in an extraordinary time of revival in Christianity. Collective conversions and signs of repentance and faith were reported from all parts of the world and placed in a large eschatological perspective. After the Protestant Reformation—the climax of church history since the New Testament—a great decline had set in comparable to the Middle Ages. The “Great Awakening” seemed to recapture the spirit of the first Pentecost and offered prospects for a further extension of God's Kingdom. By means of missionary work among the heathen peoples, the Gospel would reach the ends of earth. Finally, after the collective conversion of the Jews and a millennium of peace, the time would come for the Lord of the Church to appear on the clouds of heaven to gather the harvest of all times.

On August 21, 1861, Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana, issued a pastoral letter “on the occasion of the War of Southern Independence.” In it, Martin argued that slavery was “the manifest will of God.” It was the will of God for Catholics to continue “snatching from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan,” the cursed progeny of Noah. It was also the obligation of Catholics to repudiate abolitionists for “upset[ting] the will of Providence” and misusing “His merciful plans for unrighteous actions.” Father Napoleon Joseph Perché, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, submitted his approval of Martin's pastoral statement by printing it in the Catholic newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique. Three years later, the Roman Congregation of the Index issued a statement condemning the opinions espoused by Martin and approved by the French ecclesiastical leadership of New Orleans. The Index was Pope Pius IX's organization in charge of censoring ideas deemed unacceptable to Catholic doctrine. The Index argued against Martin's proposition “that there exists a natural difference between negroes and whites,” and that God sanctioned slavery as a means of redeeming Africans.

One peculiar phenomenon in the Korean Protestant churches today is that most churches, regardless of their size and denomination, assert that they are “evangelical.” By claiming to be evangelical, they want to display not simply their conservative theological stance but also continuity with their tradition. Self-acclaimed evangelical churches generally believe that the early Korean church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also evangelical, and hence they are its true heirs. Moreover, in the mind of the self-consciously evangelical Korean Christians, “Puritanism” is something to be admired, a lost glory of which evangelicalism is the closest contemporary replica. A few progressive churches would distance themselves from this general tendency, but these churches are more often than not far smaller and less appealing to the average Christian. World-class megachurches and nearly all rank-and-file churches in Korea are “evangelical” churches. The matter in Korean Protestantism is more who is “really” evangelical rather than a competition between evangelicals and non-evangelicals.

According to the town criers of liberal American journalism, readers must wake up and do something. Hide your children—there is a movement afoot among conservative Christians to take over our country and give America a theocratic makeover. A slew of magazine articles and books—with apocalyptic titles such as American Theocracy and The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us1— announced conservative Christians' backward views on social and political issues, insidious webs of government influence, and intentions to return America to its supposedly Christian roots. Most of these authors devoted at least a few pages to an obscure religious movement and a man with a curious name: Christian reconstructionism and R. J. Rushdoony.