In the Papal States of the end of the sixteenth century, most female monasteries were mendicant. In doing so, nuns violated many rules of the XXVth session of the Council of Trent: they obviously did not respect enclosure, but also were unable to survive only thanks to their real estate properties, as stated by the chapters 2, 3, and 16 of the De Regularibus et Monialibus decree. This financial situation of convents was addressed for the first time by Clement VIII (1592–1605), who led a broad economic reform all over his territory. How was the economic reform of convents led by Clement VIII applied in the local realities of the Papal States, what were its impacts on nuns, and how did they react to these changes? Based on the letters received by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars in Rome during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, this article addresses the materiality and the local peculiarities of the economic reform of female convents in the dioceses of the Papal States, highlighting the strategies used by nuns to fight against change, negotiate accommodation, or adapt their daily lives to the new Roman requirements. Much less known and studied than the Tridentine enclosure, the economic reform desired by the same Council of Trent is an equally important change whose impacts durably transformed the daily life and identity of nuns.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the height of European demonological interest—England experienced a series of demonic possession cases that gained substantial attention from the clergy and laypeople alike. Reported across sensationalist pamphlets and learned demonological treatises, these cases were presented as extraordinary tokens of God's providence intended to be interpreted and responded to by those involved. English Calvinists during this period were largely interested in demonic possession for three primary reasons: what providential meaning this spiritual affliction offered, what action God was compelling them to carry out, and, more importantly, what profit they could gain in fulfilling their godly duties. The profit cited by these Calvinists was a glimpse into their predestined fate. This article argues that demonic affliction was fashioned as an emblematic phenomenon by English Calvinist communities with dispossession (exorcism) cast as a definitive form of spiritual warfare designed to provide comfort for the faithful and guide them toward a blessed conclusion. In this context, possession functioned as a providential catalyst: a call to carry out dispossession that, once fulfilled, brought the entire act to completion. Examining four possession textual accounts in detail, with a particular focus on the exploits of the controversial Puritan exorcist John Darrell, this article examines the intellectual construction of spirit possession and exorcism within an aligned Calvinist providential and eschatological framework. These cases exemplify many of the prevailing interpretations of spirit possession in the early modern English context and illustrate how this affliction offered individuals a potential salve to the vexed nature of Calvinist predestination.

The 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline could be established for inferring those deliberations. But it has long been taken as a given that John Cotton's draft is missing.

The now-recovered draft was, among other things, Cotton's vehicle for working reforms restraining Congregationalism's democratic and fissiparous tendencies into the Cambridge Platform. He had first laid out those reforms in Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), a book that attracted widespread attention, including at the English Westminster and Savoy Assemblies. Yet the slender amount of scholarship on the Cambridge Platform has offered, at most, generalized acknowledgment, if any, of Cotton's considerable and complicated impact on it. That neglect leaves a large gap in our understanding of the platform, the synod, and Cotton himself, as well as of the unstable dynamics of clerical authority in an awkwardly peripheral emergent puritan church movement that emphasized lay empowerment.

In the contested spiritual economy of the early nineteenth century, recently disestablished American clergymen consolidated themselves in theological seminaries. Members of the dominant New England Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministries, these seminarians organized a defensive front against itinerant, populist rivals by intensifying their curricula, proscribing physical exertion as a distraction from study, and shielding clerical students from popular influence. Yet critical voices from within the seminaries soon reported that unrelenting study damaged students’ bodily health and alienated the clergy from a laity on whom their educational funding now depended. Accompanying such critiques were proposals for an alternative pedagogy that gained its fullest expression in the manual labor school, where physical vigor was enshrined as a complement to theological training and where barriers separating clergy from laity were minimized. By situating the infirmities that seminarians logged in memoirs and exposés alongside their efforts to reform the seminary system, this article argues that the graduate clergy mustered a coherent, forceful response to the crisis in spiritual leadership that disestablishment precipitated. The article presents clerical elites not as casualties of democratization or as agents of capital, but as self-aware and self-interested economic actors in the reordering of American religious authority after disestablishment.

Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were strikingly different. Before removal, Cherokee printers emulated Anglo-Protestant prototypes in terms of dimensions, layout, and typography. The goal was to increase the likelihood of staying on their lands by winning white patrons and nudging Cherokee readers to see themselves as acculturated reading subjects. After removal, Cherokee printers rethought acculturation as a strategy. They redesigned Poor Sarah to turn away from white audiences and instead address the Cherokee community and its needs. Attention to the evolving materialities of Poor Sarah reveals Cherokee Christian printing as a key site of Indigenous media theory and part of Cherokee Nation's repertory of political action in response to US imperialism and settler colonialism.

In this article, I invite the guild to rethink received paradigms and perspectives in the study and teaching of American church and religious history. The common additive approach of the last decades that folds in Latino/a experience usually reflects new themes of contemporary immigration and diversity, but rarely considers constitutive contributions to foundational stories or is conscious of perspectival constraints. In the spirit of previous ASCH presidential addresses, the proposed introspection weighs the cost of the refractions, redactions, and omissions. Through a reconsideration of seminality—whether agential or textual—in Spanish colonial expansion (Esteban of Azamor), in the Puritan colonial imaginary, and in Latino/Latin American Pentecostal growth, and of anachronistic geographical boundaries in the case of New Mexico curate Antonio José Martínez, this address calls for greater clarity in our understanding of the variegated contours of Americana church history.