In my review of previous presidential addresses, I found it interesting to discover that only one had built upon one of the most significant cultural and scholarly developments of the past generation and perhaps the past century, that is, women's and, later, gender studies and their relevance for our respective fields. That was Jane Dempsey Douglass's address twenty years ago as the first woman president of this Society on “what Calvin learned at the school of women,” an event that will surely be recognized in the program session tomorrow on “Women in the American Society of Church History.”

The stark antithesis between the secular and the religious has been effectively challenged by scholarship of early modern Italy, which has shown the degree to which these fields necessarily overlapped. Nevertheless, studies of early modern female devotion, especially within convents, often present women as caught between competing claims of kinship and clerical authority, a conflict between family and convent, an opposition between the secular and the divine. This paper argues that within Neapolitan conventual circles, at least, nuns' noble blood was regarded as enhancing the spiritual value of their convents, and that, on the whole, the way in which the Decrees of the Council of Trent were interpreted served to “aristocratize” convents. Something of a fusion occurred between nobility and spirituality in women. This paper relates this fusion to discourses on nobility and to the aristocratization of convent culture after enclosure at Trent, examining how it marked post-Tridentine Neapolitan convent architecture and urbanism. In short, I argue that nuns' nobility enhanced the spiritual value of Neapolitan convents after Trent, and that such status was communicated discursively, architecturally, and urbanistically.

In a letter from Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century, written while he was in hiding during the Decian persecution to the imprisoned confessors in Carthage, there is mention of two crowns, two colors and two flowers. The letter can be dated to the middle of April 250. Cyprian wanted to console those in prison that they would not be failures if they failed to be martyred. Those who were not martyred could receive equal renown through their confession as those who were martyred. As much as martyrdom was highly prized among African Christians, Cyprian wanted to assure the imprisoned confessors that it was not the only way to please God. In the past (ante), in a time undoubtedly before persecution, one could be clad in white for good works, just as now one could be clad in crimson for martyrdom. For those who were not going to die a martyr's death and win the crimson crown for suffering or the flower of warfare, Cyprian seemed to say that the confession of their faith could now be counted as a good work for which the reward was the white crown or the flower of peace.

Despite the energy devoted by American and Western European church historians and theologians to the question of the ordination of women in early Christianity and in the (western) medieval Christian Church, these scholars have shown comparatively little interest toward the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church, even when comparative analysis could potentially help elucidate questions regarding the theology and practice of women's ordinations in the West. Most of the research on the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church has occurred in Mediterranean academic circles, usually within the field of Byzantine studies, or in the Eastern Orthodox theological community; sometimes the examination of the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church has been part of a broader examination of women's liturgical ministries.

In 1996, Bernhard Lohse wondered if the Luther presented by some would recognize the Luther described by others. Trying to recognize the “political” Luther would be especially difficult. On the one hand, Thomas Müntzer was but the first in a long line of polemicists, journalists, politicians, and scholars who have accused Luther of releasing the sword of secular authority from all control and thereby opening up centuries of authoritarian subjugation. On the other hand, Peter Frarin argued in 1566 that Protestantism equaled sedition, rebellion, and the subversion of civil order. In the criticism of Luther for being either too conservative or too liberal, one thing remained fairly constant: the source of Luther's major shortcoming—his theology of the Two Kingdoms.

In reading many early Christian texts from and about Egypt, one is struck by the importance of space for the ascetic lifestyle. Whether it be Antony locked in his desert fortress, the tightly arranged cells of Kellia in the Apopthegmata Patrum, or the landscape of the desert in so much hagiographical literature, the space in which the early Christians practiced ascetic renunciation was as infused with as much meaning as the ascetic practices themselves. Since few texts with descriptions of early ascetic space survive, studies have been left largely to archaeologists and art historians, not historians of Christianity. Only a handful of ascetic authors from the fourth through sixth centuries wrote about the theological significance they found in the building of churches. These include the wealthy Latin patron Paulinus of Nola (Italy), two anonymous members of the Pachomian monasteries in Egypt, and the Egyptian archimandrite Shenoute. The churches built for each of these late antique communities held deep theological significance. They symbolized the ascetic endeavors undertaken at those communities. Since for each writer, the ascetic struggle was constituted in slightly different terms, with different goals, practices, and interpretations of those practices, so were the church buildings imbued with different meanings. Yet, in each case, the church held meaning beyond its mere walls. Each was constructed as much by a theology and a discourse of ascetic discipline as it was by wood, brick, and stone.

It was the Primitive Christians of the “purest ages” who inspired and encouraged the Methodist leader, John Wesley, to create a movement based on his vision of the ancient Church. Wesley was convinced that Methodist doctrine, discipline, and depth of piety came nearer to the Primitive Church than to any other group. Methodism, he argued in his sermon for Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel in 1777, was the “old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the Primitive Church.”

In May 1653, John Murcot, a well-connected Merton College Oxford graduate, travelled to Cork to preach at the request of local Puritans. As a minister adhering to the Independent system of church order, he had already faced a series of challenges to the fulfilment of his clerical calling. In the 1640s, his studies had been interrupted when Royalist troops occupied his university; on his first journey to Dublin, in 1651, he had narrowly escaped capture at the hands of pirates in the Irish Sea. In Cork, Murcot's ministry met with much success until he became entangled in a controversy that threatened to tear apart the local Puritan administration and, more widely, the Irish Puritan consensus.

Martin Luther, writing in his Betbuchlein in 1522, declared:

Among the many harmful books and doctrines which are misleading and deceiving Christians and give rise to countless false beliefs, I regard the personal prayer books as by no means the least objectionable. They drub into the minds of simple people such a wretched counting up of sins and going to confession, such un-Christian tomfoolery about prayers to God and his saints! Moreover, these books are puffed up with promises of indulgences. … These books need a basic and thorough reformation if not total extermination.… But I just don't have the time to undertake such a reformation; it is too much for me alone.

Around 1184, Alan de Lille composed a sermon addressed to Europe's knights (Ad milites) as part of a treatise on the art of preaching (Ars praedicandi). In it, Alan condemned the felonious and violent behavior of Western warriors and reproached them for their mistreatment of the poor and the Church—the very groups that knights ought to protect in an ideal Christian society. According to Alan, such actions must cease and knightly behavior must be reformed. Using scriptural precedent, he encouraged knights to consider their spiritual welfare by articulating a difference between internal and external military service. Knights, if they wish to be soldiers of God, must wield both temporal and spiritual arms: the former to protect the Church and their homelands, the latter to combat the enemies of their souls. Balance between the two was essential since external service (earthly combat) was empty and meaningless without its internal counterpart (spiritual combat). By ensuring the proper equilibrium, knights could fulfill their assigned role in the world while actively working to ensure their own salvation.

Friedrich Oldenberg (1820–94), the Managing Director of the Central Committee for Inner Missions, toured the southern districts of East Prussia in the autumn of 1865. He made the trip at the request of the Inner Mission Society and the Senior Consistory in Berlin because officials had received some disturbing information about the pastors serving in the United Prussian Church. According to the reports, the clergy in the eastern districts were so insensitive and lazy that Protestant parishioners were turning to Catholic priests for pastoral care and then converting to Catholicism. Members of the Senior Consistory and the Minister for Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Heinrich von Mühler (1813–74), were concerned and wanted a trustworthy individual to inspect the region and submit a report on the East Prussian churchscape. They chose Friedrich Oldenberg, a Jewish convert and native of Königsberg (East Prussia), as well as a longtime member of the Inner Mission Society. He toured the districts for two months and organized his findings in a lengthy report of 173 pages that he submitted in January 1866 to officials in Berlin.

In the spring of 1868, sixty-eight students gathered to become the first matriculants of the Illinois Industrial University. They had responded to a summons by the state legislature to engage in a bold new mission of publicly funded mechanical and industrial education, a move which would, Illinoisans hoped, bring lavish prosperity to their fellow citizens and themselves. Like other colleges of the period, utilitarian and democratic rationales motivated the I. I. U. leadership to establish their school. Quoting their commission by the Morrill Act, the trustees said the university's “chief aim” was to educate “the industrial classes” by teaching “such branches of learning as are related to Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, and Military Tactics, without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” And yet, there was an even more radical and compelling vision among the I.I.U. faithful, one which was distinctively theological: “The hope of the Trustees and Faculty,” they said, “is that the Institution will produce … men of Christian culture … able and willing to lend a helping hand in all the great practical enterprises of this most practical age.”

The connections between the Polish Reformed Churches and the Dutch Eglises Wallonnes have never been properly examined. Apart from a few notes in articles from the beginning of the twentieth century, no attempt has been made to describe them in an integrated manner, taking into account the Walloon archives in the Bibliotheque Wallonne, as well as other Walloon sources. The aim of this publication is to examine Walloon–Polish communications in the eighteenth century, a time important for both the Walloons and the Polish Reformed. While for the former it was a period of growth and expansion, for the latter it was quite the opposite. This difference allowed the Walloon to help the Poles in their plight, strengthening the Walloon's position as supporters of endangered Protestant communities worldwide.

Among the many changes brought about by the Reformation, perhaps one of the most obvious was the new image of the Protestant pastor. No longer was he set apart from his parishioners by the privileges of a separate estate or by the requirement of clerical celibacy. His most important functions were preaching and teaching, rather than the administration of the sacraments and other ecclesiastical ceremonies. Although there were clearly continuities between the duties performed by the late medieval priest and the new Protestant pastor, there was also a significant change in emphasis and in the expectations concerning the pastor's duties.

Writers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England have stressed the significance of doctors and clergy in the provision of residential care for the better-off mad person. “The private madhouse trade in fact started with the practice of doctors taking private patients into their homes.” So wrote Macalpine and Hunter. According to William Parry-Jones, English “lunatics from the more affluent classes were cared for individually, often in the custody of medical men or clergymen.” The two professions commonly overlapped, meaning that clerics could provide medical care. Andrew Mason has written enthusiastically that “towards the end of the seventeenth-century, so-called ‘clerical mad doctors’ abounded.” As educated men working in an occupation with few barriers to entry, English clergy could “readily take up medicine,” which was just one element of the burgeoning eighteenth-century market place. “Those entering the madbusiness were drawn from … clergymen, both orthodox and non-conformist, businessmen, widows, surgeons, speculators, and physicians.”

In the wake of the 1927 landmark Supreme Court decision in the Buck v. Bell case, which affirmed the constitutionality of laws authorizing the compulsory sterilization of so-called “feeble-minded” residents of state institutions, moral theologian and priest John A. Ryan took up his pen to address the issue of sterilization from a Catholics perspective. In the resulting pamphlet, Human Sterilization, Ryan argued that eugenic sterilization measures were not only unscientific and bad social policy, but that the Buck decision in its articulation of civil rights represented a clear departure from the understanding of natural rights in Catholic moral teaching. The production of this text was the first piece of literature published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference that attempted to mobilize Catholic citizens throughout the United States in active opposition to eugenic sterilizahon laws as they came before the state legislatures.

We, Lucifer, lord of darkness, ruler of deep sadness, emperor of the hellish cesspool, duke of the sulphuric waters, king of the cliff, and administrator of the hellish fire, to each and everyone in our realm, friends, bishops, prelates, cathedral canons, clergy, and all others of whatever dignity and the state you may be in: our greetings.

Surveying the short history of pentecostalism in 1925, Frank Bartelman—a consummate “insider historian”—reckoned that although the Azusa Street revival had become “full grown” in Los Angeles, California, it was “rocked in the cradle of little Wales.” In pentecostal historiography much ink has been spilled connecting the causal dots of precedence. From whence did the movement come? Los Angeles? India? Topeka, Kansas? Historians of pentecostalism are cognizant of the 1904–05 Welsh revival; they readily acknowledged that it in some way influenced the Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles. My goal here is not necessarily to argue one way or another but rather to resurrect from the dustbin of history a significant event that deserves its own due. This is a story, argues historian Rhodri Hayward, that “has been largely forgotten.”