Anger was a topic of significant reflection in antiquity, and it was taken up in new ways in early Christianity. As contemporary historians explore the myriad ways in which emotions were not only described but also presented, scripted, and made normative in historical sources, greater clarity is needed to understand the ways in which institutions were involved in shaping emotions. This essay argues that Augustine of Hippo's catechetical instruction on the Lord's Prayer constituted a critical institution for the transposition of classical discourses on anger and its healing into Christian education. Augustine understood the catechumenate itself as an institution for teaching patience and forbearance as antidotes to anger, and in these settings, he provided a variety of cognitive and spiritual exercises for diagnosing and treating anger. By articulating baptismal education as an emotion-shaping institution, we can better appreciate the ways in which Christian communities developed and expanded the inherited institutions of antiquity for ordering the emotions. In addition, such reflection allows us to evaluate the subtle interplays between emotions as felt subjective experiences and as reflective of social organizations that instilled and prescribed emotional norms.

This article adds to our understanding of late medieval women's religious writing by examining the role of the Virgin Mary in Mechthild of Magdeburg's thirteenth-century mystical text The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende Licht der Gottheit). The Virgin Mary was ubiquitous in late medieval religious writing, but she played different roles and modeled different ways of life, reflecting the particular aims of individual authors. In Mechthild's text, Mary is depicted as a spiritual teacher who actively draws the narrator into higher forms of the mystical life. Mechthild also portrays the Virgin in several traditional roles, adapting each of these roles to support her particular vision of the mystical life. Mary thus functions as a model for religious experience in The Flowing Light, while also authorizing and sanctioning Mechthild's contemplative ideals.

When it was first brought to light in 2010, an anonymously authored, unpublished document from 1690, Proposals for the propagating of the Christian Religion, and Converting of Slaves whether Negroes or Indians in the English plantations, appeared to support claims for an emerging humanitarian sensibility among Christian antislavery reformers in seventeenth-century England. This article argues that Scottish Covenanter, colonizer, and enslaver William Dunlop was the author of these proposals. Dunlop's authorship casts them in a new light, showing the complex ways Christianity and slavery were entangled in this period and the challenges Reformed Protestants faced in their attempts to disentangle them. Dunlop's Reformed background and experience in the Presbyterian resistance movement during the “killing times” of the early 1680s led him to view slavery as anti-Christian tyranny and liberty as the will of God. But during his time in Carolina he was deeply implicated in enslaving illegally seized Christian Indian captives, African chattel slaves, white indentured servants seeking freedom in Spanish Catholic Florida, and even fellow Covenanters banished to the plantations for their resistance to episcopacy. Dunlop's proposals emerged from these dual contexts. They tried and failed to imagine a form of Christian slavery that gave enough freedom to enslaved people to lead authentic Christian lives, showing instead that Christianity and slavery were incompatible and offering reformers only a stark choice: not Christian slavery, but Christianity or slavery.

The Illinois, particularly the Kaskaskia, are well known to have converted in large numbers to Catholicism under the guidance of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, another lesser-known missionary society, the Missions Étrangères, also evangelized among the Illinois. The juxtaposition of these two French Catholic missionary societies working among the same Native nation provides an ideal case study to understand what aspects of Catholicism Native people appreciated and rejected. Converted Illinois people chose a specific practice of Catholicism that upheld fundamental values, enhanced gender roles and kinship connections in Illinois society, and strengthened their relationship to the secular aspects of the French empire.

This article explores affective and emotional components of conspiracism in the 1765 Boston Stamp Act Crisis. Once a common subject in the study of Revolutionary America, conspiracism has disappeared from the historiography in recent decades. I argue that this is a serious oversight in understanding religion in the Revolutionary era. Unmasking conspiratorial plots against colonial liberties was a religious experience in the colonies, simultaneously imbuing liberty with a felt sense of sacredness and forging an emotional separation between the colonies and England. In making this claim, this article aims to demonstrate how scholars of religion might incorporate affect into the historical study of religion. Attention to affective cues, particularly in religious texts, sheds light on the phenomenology of historical religion. Through such analysis, we can begin to understand how religious communities formed through affective connections to the sacred, what that sacred felt like, and how bodily and emotional experience shaped reactions to violations of the sacred. In the case of the Stamp Act Crisis, conspiracism, anti-Catholicism, and satanic symbolism sparked an affectively charged moment characterized by fear, disgust, and anger. As colonists participated in unmasking supposed Catholic and Parliamentary conspiracies against them, they created a community united around scared liberty.

In 1836, a new Roman Catholic periodical, The Dublin Review, was founded by Nicholas Wiseman, Michael Joseph Quin, and Daniel O'Connell. Though religion was only one aspect of its intended focus, the place and identity of Roman Catholicism in post-emancipation Britain was a major emphasis. Of particular focus was the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), otherwise known as Tractarianism. Wiseman, then rector of the English College, Rome, had paid close attention to the Oxford Movement since 1833 and, via the Dublin Review, would critically engage with Tractarian literature and ideas. This paper examines this engagement from 1836 to 1845, discussing Wiseman's polemical responses to the Oxford Movement. Paying attention to the pre-history of the Dublin Review, its importance as a periodical, and its significant influence upon a handful of the leading Tractarians, especially John Henry Newman, Wiseman emerges as an influential polemicist and apologist. Respectful of Tractarian learning and zeal, Wiseman was nonetheless unambiguous in his criticisms of Tractarian ecclesiology—relentless especially in his promotion of the view that the leaders of the Oxford Movement should convert to Roman Catholicism. By 1840, the year Wiseman arrived in England as a bishop, the Dublin Review had significantly dented Newman's confidence in the Tractarian project. Wiseman, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, had, by means of the Dublin Review, made Roman Catholic views on Tractarianism known, heard, and felt in Oxford and Britain. In the case of John Henry Newman, who became a Roman Catholic in 1845, Wiseman could claim a significant victory.