This article examines a little-studied work by Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167): his tractate on the miracles of the saints of Hexham—referred to here as Miracula—composed for the feast of the saints’ translation in 1154/1155. While Miracula has been incidental to the prolific scholarship on Aelred, this article brings it back to the center of Aelred's life and thought. It describes Miracula in some detail, putting to rest any speculation that Aelred was not the text's author through a careful treatment of the surviving manuscripts. It then explores Aelred's sophisticated notions of who the saints were, how they inhabited Hexham, and what he and his audience expected the saints to do on their behalf. Finally, it demonstrates that Aelred intentionally combined local traditions about the saints with his own modern Cistercian concerns about spiritual life to produce an innovative meditation on saints, miracles, and veneration. Miracula allows scholars to see Aelred not only as a preeminent reformed Cistercian thinker but also as someone formed by and committed to the ongoing cult of the local saints.

This article examines the role of lay seigneurs in religious change in the French countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Catholic Reformation and a period of socioeconomic change in land ownership and exploitation. The focus here is on middling and lesser lords—the rough equivalent of the English gentry, who held land in a single province or even pays and had a frequent presence in their parishes—rather than the great nobles who operated at a national level. Brittany is used as a case study, for it was a province rich in rural lords and because relatively good source material survives. It is argued that seigneurs were important patrons of religious innovation in the countryside, particularly in the parish church. They were rarely innovators themselves, but they lent support and resources to the introduction and maintenance of new devotional practices. Lords worked closely with clergy, sharing their aspirations and ideas. Four areas were particularly prominent in eliciting their support: appointment of clergy, support of missionaries, new devotional practices, and funding of building projects and liturgies in parish churches. These combined family strategies of enhancing social status and individual means to salvation which were indivisible in the world of the lay rural nobility. It was from a traditional understanding of lordship that patronage of religious reform stemmed.

Much of John Goodwin's theological output can be viewed as a backlash against the “orthodox” doctrine of God. That God, as Goodwin conceived him, was too eager to command the “impossible” and too inclined to “delight” in the punishment of the noncompliant. During the early 1650s, Goodwin turned to the pagans in order to articulate the gracious countenance of a wise and equitable deity. In the process, he went close to canceling the operational distinction between grace and nature. For nature, according to Goodwin, preached unlettered sermons about “atonement.” And because, as Paul declared in Romans, the blessings of creation render the sins of creatures inexcusable, it is only because they willfully repudiate the deity's gracious overtures that pagans deprive themselves of excuse. The doctrine, as Goodwin presented it, horrified his many opponents. It seemed to them that Goodwin had lodged in the “free will” of rational creatures the power to attain salvation. He put himself on a collision course with the magisterial masters—Bucer, Vermigli, Calvin, Pareus, and others—whose lead he professed, in many respects, to follow. There is reason to suspect that Goodwin had been particularly indebted to Arminius, Episcopius, and Corvinus.

This article explores the secularization of the American historical profession through the lens of an early twentieth-century historical controversy: the debunking of the legend that nineteenth-century missionary Marcus Whitman saved the Pacific Northwest from becoming a British possession. The Whitman controversy was a key skirmish in an ongoing, and still unresolved, debate about what constitutes right practices and ideations of history in the American academy, what counts as undue historical bias, and what place (if any) appeals to religion should have in academic historical discourse. Through the Whitman debate and other early twentieth-century historical battles, Protestant providential narratives of history were purged from academic textbooks and providential historians marginalized from the academy. Taking a cue from the evolutionary schemas of religious studies scholars, professional historians cast tales like the Whitman legend—and the providential narratives that undergirded them—as primitive myths unfit for a modernizing society. The Whitman controversy thus serves as a case study into the American historical profession's transformation at the turn of the twentieth century, a transformation that remains contested and incomplete.

The interplay of religion, politics, and state in National Socialist Germany continues to defy facile characterizations. In 1934, mere weeks following the Röhm Putsch in which the Nazi regime committed dozens of political assassinations, Berlin hosted thousands of Baptists from across the globe who would unanimously decry nationalism and racialism and advocate for the separation of church and state. Held from August 4–10, 1934, the fifth Baptist World Congress marks the zenith of German Baptist publicity and international Baptist cooperation during the interwar period. The Congress thus provides a focal point for analyzing interwar British and German Baptist relations. This relationship reflected both international cooperation and the gradual divergence of doctrine along nationalistic lines. German Baptists experienced greater freedom of exercise under the Third Reich than under previous regimes, and they leveraged their international connections in order to further their mission. They refused to become involved in the well-documented “Church Struggle” of the Confessing Church and the “German Christian Movement,” and this refusal strained international partnerships. The German Baptist experience challenges many assumptions concerning the churches under the Third Reich as it illustrates the Nazi regime's permissive toleration of a biblicist Free Church group with propagandistically valuable international connections.

In the past decade, Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) historiography has enjoyed an efflorescence that warrants the attention of church historians. Two notable books mark the surge of interest in Adventism and its prophet: one of them an extraordinary denominational history, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, by Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart (1989; 2007); the other an excellent collection of essays, Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L. Numbers (2014). Both books remind church historians that Seventh-day Adventism deserves its due as one of America's original religions. Since 2005, however, a number of books have appeared that understandably have received less scrutiny. The Adventist Pioneer Series, in particular, produced by SDA scholars and published by SDA presses, has largely escaped the notice of the wider, non-SDA historical community. This is unfortunate. There is the inevitable unevenness among these volumes, and given their intent to serve a popular Adventist audience, there is also the predictable parochialism in them, in some more than others. Nevertheless, to date there are several books in the series, and no doubt more to follow, which should command serious scholarly interest. To make our way through this largely unfamiliar historiographical landscape calls for a little mapping. Most of these authors come from SDA backgrounds, whatever distance they have gone from them. It will be necessary, then, to reflect on the differences between a historian of Adventism and an Adventist historian, secular versus supernatural history, and apologists who rate scholarly notice and those who do not. It will be important as well to realize that there is no hard, unyielding line between these differences.