Magical practices have been described as a point of convergence for different pathways in medieval culture. This article examines one such convergence in the ritual use of hyssop in medieval Latin theology, liturgy, and a group of magical texts linked to the understudied Book of Raziel. In these magical texts, hyssop supposedly helped the living speak to the dead through its use as a tool for sprinkling liquid over a grave. The magical use of hyssop made sense because of its cultural and liturgical significance as a tool for aspersion and as a symbol of cleansing and exorcism. In the medieval Latin world, hyssop possessed a cultural power that individuals could use for a range of purposes. The different uses of hyssop illustrate the widespread entanglement of medieval liturgical and magical ritual, as well as high medieval processes of cross-cultural translation between the Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin worlds. Bygone and flamboyant methods of bringing voices from the past into the present also intersect in theme and function with the ongoing professional work of historians, who pursue their own affective necromancy in their desire for the past.

The English Parliament's conquest of Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century left memories of violence that persist even in modern Ireland. This article considers one important but neglected dimension to the English campaign and subsequent rule: the attack on Irish Catholic devotional objects, including statues, images, vestments. The damage to the physical fabric of Irish Catholicism coincided with the wider effort to suppress all its public rituals and structures and must be considered as a key element to Parliament's campaign to punish, reform, and convert the Irish. Reconsidering both older and recently published sources allows for significant new insights and contextual questions surrounding parliamentarian iconoclasm, its Irish manifestations, and indeed early modern iconoclasm more widely. In particular, it is argued here that this is not and cannot be an Irish story alone: while previous accounts have emphasized Ireland's tragedy in these years, there are wider English and British contexts that must be brought to bear. Irish iconoclasm can be placed into a chronology of English violence since the late 1630s and points to a wider British preoccupation with popish plots and idolatry, in which the Irish were central characters. The iconoclasm unleashed in Cromwellian Ireland underlines the braided nature of conflict across the mid-seventeenth century.

Between 1820 and 1850, American presses generated an enormous amount of literature devoted to the myth of apostolic Waldensianism. Though the Waldenses began as a lay reform movement in the twelfth century, speculations about their apostolic origin were popularized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This historical construction gave American Protestants a versatile rhetorical weapon against an increasingly encroaching Roman Catholicism. The apostolicity of Waldensianism allowed Protestants to trace their teachings not only to scripture but through the middle ages and the early church, providing a ready answer to Catholic accusations of Protestant novelty. Additionally, re-narrating the history of Waldensian persecution at the hand of Catholics reinforced nativist conceptions of Catholicism as a violently tyrannical religion, and became a call to action for Protestants to resist Rome's attempt to gain power in the United States. Though the myth of apostolic Waldensianism was widely held by American Protestants, by 1850 it became largely untenable. Historians on both side of the Atlantic contextualized the group as a medieval phenomenon, rather than the remnant of apostolic Protestantism.

Bernard of Clairvaux's letter to his young cousin Robert, written in the early 1120s CE, ignited a public controversy between the powerful Cluniacs and the upstart Cistercians over proper monastic practice and recruitment that smoldered throughout the twelfth century. This article examines how Cistercian polemics arose out of this new monastic competition to form Cistercian identity. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians under his influence employed a rhetoric that drew on notions of space, age, and gender to present their rivals as worldly, feminine, and immature and themselves as mature and masculine warriors on the front lines of ascetic battle against the vices. In doing so, the Cistercians deployed a gendered concept of “childhood” and “youth” that shaped their understanding of monastic conversion and progression as maturation from a worldly, feminized child to a mature and masculine monk. By centering “childhood” as a category of analysis, this article demonstrates the importance of age to Cistercian constructions of monastic masculinity. The gender-crossing martial, nuptial, and maternal imagery for which the Cistercians are famous relied on constructions of the “child.” This article shows that “childhood” and “adulthood” are mutually constitutive, gendered categories and reveals that “childhood” is as important to constructing Christian masculinities as notions of “woman.”

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.

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 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.

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.

Liturgy has often served as a source for studying the identities of medieval religious communities through examining local saints and special chants or ceremonies. This article deepens such approaches by considering the practice of liturgical coordination, which required each convent to reconcile the obligations imposed upon it by the order to which it belonged, the diocese in which it lay, and the personal networks of its sisters. The shifting dates of the Easter cycle created a wide variety of possible calendrical conflicts and necessitated that each convent's liturgical practice be organized anew every year. Focusing on German-language liturgical manuals from Observant Dominican convents, this article introduces these sources and examines the various obligations, authorities, and sources of advice that Dominican sisters coordinated when planning each year's liturgy. It then turns to the concrete example of a major calendrical conflict on May 1, 1519, which illustrates how convents negotiated their networked obligations and defended their decisions. Supplementing traditional sources such as chronicles and charters, liturgical administrative documents reveal how each convent's liturgical identity was both iterative and networked and how the tensions between these features opened up spaces for assertive decision-making.

In a 1683 sermon, Benjamin Calamy, an Anglican priest, claimed that the separation of Dissenters from the Church of England was unjustifiable. Thomas Delaune, a London Baptist schoolmaster, responded in A Plea for the Non-Conformists (1684), which compared seventeenth-century Dissenters to sixteenth-century Reformers who had escaped from the “Church of Rome.” The Restoration authorities judged the book to be a seditious libel, for which Delaune was arrested, tried, and imprisoned in Newgate, where he was soon joined by his poverty-stricken wife and two children. By 1685, the whole family had perished in Newgate. This tragic story guaranteed Delaune's status as a martyr for generations of Nonconformists. Indeed, the Plea achieved amongst Dissenters the reputation of an “unanswerable” text. Its enduring appeal transcended denominational and geographical boundaries. This paper explores the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of the Plea, which Dissenters, both in England and America, repurposed for various politico-theological circumstances. Throughout the eighteenth century, Dissenters invoked the Plea against perceived cases of episcopal tyranny. By the pluralistic nineteenth century, however, this external, episcopal threat had largely been replaced with an internal one, prompting Dissenters to deploy the Plea against corruption and lethargy within their own denominations.

From 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603–1604, 1625–1626, 1636, and 1665–1666). A broad survey of sermons, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and dialogues from these years reveals not only the bills’ ubiquity as an index of divine punishments, but the new kinds of intellectual work made possible by a multiplicity of numbers keyed to times and places. Claims about the moral, doctrinal, and political meanings behind the plague could now be made with an unprecedented specificity and sophistication, seized upon by High Church Anglicans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike. As an episode in the history of empirical theology, the bills’ ecclesiastical reception vindicates theology's central place in the epistemological transformations of the early modern period, as well as the influence of new kinds of empirical data on the parameters of religious thought.

It is often assumed, particularly by outsiders, that the conflict in Northern Ireland—known euphemistically as “the Troubles”—in which some 3,600 people lost their lives, was an atavistic throwback to Europe's religious wars of earlier centuries. In 1979, by which time some 2,000 people had already been killed in the Troubles, Pope John Paul II proposed to pay a visit to Ireland and perhaps to cross the border into Ulster's sectarian cockpit. The idea provoked outrage from some Ulster Protestants and high anxiety for the British, concerned that the Pope might inadvertently inflame the situation or embarrass the British by raising difficult issues. But there were hopes, too, that an unequivocal condemnation of violence by the head of the Catholic Church might help to bring the conflict to an end. This article, based on extensive research in diplomatic archives, reveals deep divisions within the Catholic Church on the Irish question and points to the power and limitations of the British diplomatic reach into the Vatican. It reveals also, however, the powerlessness of prayer and pleadings in the face of terrorist violence.

This essay explores the ongoing debates about the character of early Cistercian monasticism, the dating of early Cistercian documents, and assumptions about the Cistercians’ place in eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic “reform.” It analyzes the Cistercians’ narratives of their foundation in relation to particular moments in the twelfth-century history of the order, drawing on and elaborating recent theories about the dating of these documents. Although the Cistercians often seem the quintessential example of “reformed monasticism,” this essay argues that the earliest Cistercians did not present themselves as reformers but only gradually developed a rhetoric of reform over the course of the twelfth century. Finally, it suggests that reform is less a specific set of changes than it is a rhetorical use of the past that authenticates current practices and affirms that these interpretations of the past must be right and true.

Modern scholarship often attributes to Eusebius of Caesarea (d. circa 340 AD) the view that God's heavenly kingdom had become manifest in the Roman Empire of Constantine the Great. Consequently, Eusebius is deemed significant in the development of Christian eschatological thought as the supposed formulator of a new “realized eschatology” for the Christian Roman Empire. Similarly, he is considered the originator of so-called “Byzantine imperial eschatology”—that is, eschatology designed to justify the existing imperial order under the emperors in Constantinople. Scholars advancing these claims most frequently cite a line from Eusebius's Tricennial Oration in which he identified the accession of the sons of Constantine with the prophesied kingdom of the saints in the Book of Daniel. Further supposed evidence has been adduced in his other writings, especially his Life of Constantine. This article argues that this common interpretation of Eusebius's eschatology is mistaken and has resulted from treating a few passages in isolation while overlooking their rhetorical context. It demonstrates instead that Eusebius adhered to a conventional Christian eschatology centered on the future kingdom of heaven that would accompany the second coming of Christ and further suggests that the concept of “Byzantine imperial eschatology” should be reconsidered.

This article investigates the extent to which the theology and structure of marriage within the German Moravian Church functioned to connect and grow the Church as an international network across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Specifically, it argues that Moravian conceptions of marriage facilitated intentional international partnerships that led to the relocation and migration of many European women as Moravian missionaries throughout the eighteenth century. In some instances, early Moravians lived in sex-segregated communal housing and viewed sexual intercourse as a sacred unification with Christ, free of human desire. Part of the Moravian impetus to be “everywhere at home” required preventing individual congregational differences in order to create a larger international community. If the Church aimed to view all brothers and sisters as productive bodies to serve the growth of the community, then these bodies needed to be interchangeable and unrooted to a specific space. The premeditated practice of intermarriage between congregations meant that there were not individual groups that practiced the Moravian faith, but rather a singular global church family. Based on an analysis of Moravian missionary women's memoirs, this article begins to delve into the social and geographic mobility available to these eighteenth-century women through a nonnormative marital structure.

The Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers) offer a compelling literary perspective on the daily lives of early Egyptian monastics. The routine necessities of food and drink played a distinct part in the physical and spiritual survival of these novel monastic communities. When, what, and how much a monk ate could cause celebration or scandal. Every meal was likewise a test. This study has two purposes. First, it situates the Sayings's many references to bread, salt, oil, and fruit within the dietary possibilities of late antique Egypt. Second, and more broadly, this study highlights the place of eating (or not eating) as it relates to particular monastic notions of spiritual wellbeing. Meals were always an arena for acts of heroic asceticism, but they also served as highly charged communal confrontations, a dizzying back and forth of hospitality received or rejected, of honor and shame played out in alimentary paradoxes. In this, the Sayings bear witness to the spiritual politics of eating within Egyptian monastic culture and provide insight into the formation of late antique religious identities, betraying fundamental tensions inherent in other forms of Christian literature.

Between 1712 and 1715, the Convocation of the Church of England attempted to replace the existing informal orders used for the consecration of churches, chapels, and churchyards with a single uniform rite. While these efforts have been associated with the erection of the Fifty New Churches to provide for the populous and expanding suburbs of London and Westminster, the discussions actually arose out of the political divisions between the bishops and the Lower House of Convocation. The efforts to establish an official order of consecration was also a response to the changed ecclesiastical climate that followed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed for the registration of Dissenter chapels. The Established Church found its religious hegemony threatened and the particular status of its places of worship, achieved through consecration, challenged. The church responded to the criticism of their existing forms of consecration by reforming the liturgy as well as demonstrating the historical and legal basis for the practice. The sermons preached at the consecration or reopening of these churches provided a further opportunity for the clergy to justify the ceremony as well as to draw comparisons between these churches and Dissenting meetinghouses.

While much has been written on Benjamin Franklin's view of religion, less has been written on his Christian theology. This article first situates Franklin as an important figure in the religious Enlightenment, connecting his own view of philosophy to his teachings on Christian revelation. Providing historical context on the subscription debates, it then gives a comprehensive treatment of Franklin's Christian theology in the 1735 Hemphill affair. New scholarship on Franklin's transatlantic sources confirms that, far from attempting to undermine Christianity, he appealed to popular European writers in an attempt to bend it to reasonable ends. Moreover, Franklin's own views on church polity and liturgy developed over time. As he rose from a middling artisan to political power, he saw both the need for religious appeals and the threat that competing sects posed to political unity. His focus shifted from religious freedoms in private associations to institutionalizing elements of Christian teachings in education, charity, commerce, and defense. His experiences with rigid Presbyterian orthodoxy and chaotic New Light enthusiasm also awakened him to the need for more reasonable forms of worship, and he set to the task of experimenting with Christian liturgies to achieve both the tranquility of parishioners’ minds and social unity.

This article analyzes the scant treatment of Muslims in medieval inquisitorial thought, focusing mainly on the late fourteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor Nicolau Eymeric's Directorium inquisitorum (1376). It argues for four contexts in which to understand his engagement with Islam. First, as background, is a longstanding Christian (although not inquisitorial) tradition categorizing Islam as a heresy, with which he did not substantially engage. Second is his own goal to extend inquisitorial authority to new subjects, in which he drew on previous inquisitorial thought about Jews. The third involves conflicts between church officials and the Crown of Aragon about jurisdiction over non-Christian subjects. The fourth centers on the supposition that he did not view Muslims living within Christendom as an especially covert or insidious threat requiring special investigation to uncover, which speaks to how he and other inquisitors viewed their role and the nature of the threats they aimed to counter. In broad terms, this article contributes to our understanding of one important way in which medieval Christianity engaged with other religions. It also provides a basis for understanding later developments in early modern Europe.

According to Thomas Aquinas, a miracle had to surpass the whole of the created nature, which meant the visible and corporeal, as well as the invisible and incorporeal nature. Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758), the future Pope Benedict XIV, when he was promoter of the faith, noticed that it was impossible to distinguish a cure that occurred beyond the boundaries of incorporeal and invisible nature (the whole nature) from one that exceeded just corporeal and visible nature. The issue was of utmost importance since it risked delegitimizing the whole system of miracle verification. Consequently, Lambertini, in the fourth book of his magnum opus De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (On the Beatification of the Servants of God and the Canonization of the Blessed, 1734–1738), developed a new classification of miracles, which included the works of angels, with the aim of solving the problem. Furthermore, to counteract Spinoza's denial of miracles, he claimed that miracles were not contrary to the laws of nature.