In his two central monastic texts, the Institutes and the Conferences, John Cassian (c. 360-c.435) draws extensively on tropes of grammatical and rhetorical education. This language helps shape monasticism in ways that are culturally and socially acceptable to the elite, male audience in Gaul to which he is appealing. The effect of this language is not to create a monasticism that is comfortable for the elite but to transform his audience through a process analogous to their traditional education. He invents a new monastic reading culture that uses reading and writing to form the identity of a monk. Like all reading cultures, Cassian's requires a particular form of literacy, defined here as teaching certain reading methods and valuing particular texts. Indeed, Cassian's two works serve as the teaching texts for this monastic literacy and so compete against contemporaneous claims for other forms of monastic instruction. Cassian's texts function as monastic equivalents to rhetorical handbooks (the Institutes) and works of literary theory (the Conferences) and are themselves sublime replacements for “pagan” literature. The epitome of his monasticism, ecstatic prayer, is also described in terms of sublimity thereby appropriating rhetorical values and prestige into a new performance of the elite male self.

While the social and intellectual basis of voluntary martyrdom is fiercely debated, scholarship on Christian martyrdom has unanimously distinguished between “martyrdom” and “voluntary martyrdom” as separate phenomena, practices, and categories from the second century onward. Yet there is a startling dearth of evidence for the existence of the category of the “voluntary martyr” prior to the writings of Clement of Alexandria. This paper has two interrelated aims: to review the evidence for the category of the voluntary martyr in ancient martyrological discourse and to trace the emergence of the category of the voluntary martyr in modern scholarship on martyrdom. It will argue both that the category began to emerge only in the third century in the context of efforts to justify flight from persecution, and also that the assumption of Clement's taxonomy of approaches to martyrdom by scholars is rooted in modern constructions of the natural.

Outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in late medieval cities were hardly rare. For that reason, among others, surviving records are often frustratingly brief and formulaic. Yet, in the case of the pogrom that devastated Prague's Jewish community on Easter 1389, we have an extraordinary source that has yet to receive a close reading. This account, supplementing numerous chronicle entries and a Hebrew poem of lament, is the Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, or Passion of the Jews of Prague—a polished literary text that parodies the gospel of Christ's Passion to celebrate the atrocity. In this article I will first reconstruct the history, background, and aftermath of the pogrom as far as possible, then interrogate the Passio as a scriptural and liturgical parody, for it has a great deal to teach us about the inner workings of medieval anti-Judaism. By “parody” I mean not a humorous work, but a virtuosic pastiche of authoritative texts, such as the Gospels and the Easter liturgy, that would have been known by heart to much of the intended audience. We may like to think of religious parodies as “daring” or “audacious,” seeing in them a progressive ideological force that challenges corrupt institutions, ridicules absurd beliefs, and pokes holes in the pious and the pompous. But The Passion of the Jews of Prague shows that this was by no means always the case.

While many have seen the equation between Macrina and Socrates drawn in the Treatise on the Soul and the Resurrection as Gregory of Nyssa's attempt to honor his sister, a closer look at Gregory's attitude about the relative power of Christianity at the end of the fourth century suggests the opposite: that the character of Macrina lends validity to Socrates and, by extension, to non-Christian intellectual traditions. In this article, I argue that the Treatise is part of a larger project of cultural reclamation enacted by some Christians near the end of the fourth century. The educational reforms of the emperor Julian had instituted a public discourse of evaluation by which one's reading material indicated one's religious identity; after Julian, some Christians adopted this idea, yet in reverse, arguing that reading traditional literature was out of the question for Christians, as it would signal a non-Christian religious commitment. Gregory's Treatise on the Soul and the Resurrection was an effort to walk back the effects of that discourse and to return Christian pedagogy, philosophy, and cultural evaluation to a stance of ambivalence regarding Greek literature.

Reforming efforts at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the challenges of Protestantism, the rise of national states, and the reassessment of just war doctrine, had initiated a moment of crisis for crusading by the mid-sixteenth century. Indeed, historians have described these trends as signaling the end of the movement. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings deployed by an elite group of Spanish theologians and churchmen in May of 1567 to shore up their monarch's claim to a lucrative version of the crusade indulgence granted by popes since the fifteenth century. By rehearsing traditional arguments, eschewing those they saw as obsolete, and deploying new ones, these theorists expose the remarkable adaptability of crusading. The integrity of papally sanctioned holy war against the enemies of the faith collapsed in later centuries with the rise of international law and recognition of permanent divisions within the respublica Christiana. Yet, the ability of sixteenth-century Spanish theorists to recast ideology in the face of shifting intellectual, cultural, and social tides indicates the continuing viability of crusading during a period of inchoateness.

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to Christian—in the social and cultural context of empire. Epiphanius can help us reconsider late-ancient conversion not as the internal reorientation to a “new life,” but instead the exteriorized management of status and difference. As Epiphanius crafts conversion as the site of masterful intervention, he also conjures the failure of control, the blurring of boundaries, and collapse of frontiers that haunts the imperial Christian imagination.

There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. This intra-Christian competition did not, however, lead to the contestation of space in the form of processions as it did, for example, in Constantinople. At Rome, intra-Christian competition took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege and occupation. Instead of conquering urban space through processions—impossible as the Roman aristocracy and their patronage of traditional spectacles still dominated and defined the public sphere—Roman Christians resorted to warfare, until the mid-sixth century C.E. when an impoverished aristocracy ceased to lavish its diminished wealth on traditional forms of public display.

Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.

Pope Urban II (1088–99) was trained at Reims and Cluny before entering the orbit of the Gregorians around Rome. As such, Urban was first trained as an exegete. By considering how Urban used one particular verse (Daniel 2:21) and tracing that verse's intellectual lineage forward from the Fathers, through the Carolingians, we get a clearer picture not just of the vibrancy of eleventh-century intellectual life but also, ultimately, of Urban's understanding of the arc of sacred history. As a trained Carolingian exegete, Urban continued the work of his ninth-century predecessors, calling the Christian people (populus christianus) to mend their ways and strike back against the pagans, so that God would return His hand and allow the Christians to reconquer the Mediterranean world.

This paper examines Gregory VII's (1073–85) evolutionary efforts to unite the Armenian Church with Rome in the 1070s and 1080s. The pope's changing attitude towards Armenian liturgical practices, it is argued, illustrates a broader and visionary papal outlook, revealing in turn many social, cultural, political, and doctrinal dynamics at work during his pontificate. As a consequence of this interplay, Gregory's vested interest in the world beyond Latin Christendom becomes manifest, contributing ultimately to a more nuanced portrait of this pope and a broader historical understanding of his papacy and its governance.

This article represents a local study investigating the relations between the commandery of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and a Reformed Protestant community from about 1560 to 1660. The chosen locality is the French provincial town of Loudun and the article spans the French Wars of Religion and the period of recovery and reconstruction beyond. The relationship between Loudun's commandery and Reformed community manifests the sometimes astonishing interplay of conflict, accommodation, and necessity. The Protestant use of the commandery's church enabled the Reformed community to entrench itself in Loudun and remain there until the Crown revoked all the civil and religious prerogatives that it had granted to this religious minority. For its part, the commandery's fortunes and misfortunes became tied to that Reformed Protestant presence. The commandery's recovery in the first half of the seventeenth century in part drew upon the momentum of the Catholic resurgence, but the earlier Protestant use of the commandery's church and the repairs that the Protestants effectuated on the edifice gave the commandery a foothold in that process of recovery. This at times begrudged interdependence between commandery and Reformed community allowed for something resembling cross-confessional relations where one would least expect to find them.

In seventeenth-century Italy, Christian relics and images were scattered through urban spaces, not only because the faithful were expected to acknowledge and touch them, but because their moving through city streets in processions celebrated communitas, the sense of belonging that was so much part of early modern civic existence.

The Inquisitorial archive in Modena holds at least twelve processi against professing Jews (who lived for the most part in the city capital or in smaller Jewish communities scattered through the duchy) for the offence of desecrating Christian images during its most active period of prosecution between 1598 and 1640. Denunciations accused Jews of removing crucifixes from walls, stoning or tampering Christian statues and religious paintings, and failing to show the necessary respect to images carried through the streets. This paper explores the frequency of the image desecration charges against Jews in early modern Italy and in particular the duchy of Modena, the pivotal impact of internal Christian processes about their own images and whether these objects did in fact have inherent or stable meanings for Jews at this time.

The libelous depiction of King Chilperic I (561–584) and his wife Fredegund in Gregory of Tours' Decem Libri Historiarum has encouraged the false impression of these Merovingian monarchs as scourges of the Gallo-Frankish Church and its bishops. If fact, evidence from Gregory's own writings, as well as from other contemporary sources, reveals that Chilperic and Fredegund were generous patrons of ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and cults. A prosopographical database of seventeen episcopal supporters of Chilperic and Fredegund is used to evaluate the means by which the royal couple attracted and maintained episcopal support. The patronage by the royal couple of saint cults and their associated institutions also is examined. It is concluded that Chilperic and Fredegund's ecclesiastical policies are less responsible for their posthumous reputations than the choices that they made in distributing their patronage.

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of early modern Christian devotion by examining a source that has received no scholarly attention of any kind: Johannes Christoph Oelhafen's Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619). Oelhafen, a prominent Nuremberg lawyer, composed the Pious Meditations shortly after his wife, Anna Maria, died. He did so in order to console himself and his eight children in the midst of their considerable grief. Drawing on well-known rhetorical devices and consolatory remedies, Oelhafen produced a work of private devotion that is remarkable in terms of its rich affectivity and considerable artistic skill. The Pious Meditations was never published, rather Oelhafen intended it for a private circle of intimates, especially his children and their posterity. The work illustrates especially well the theme of spiritual self-care that was so prominent in early modern Lutheran devotion. The Pious Meditations also demonstrates how creative and resourceful early modern Christians could be as they sought to contend with mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence.

Despite a surfeit of studies recognizing Cotton Mather's support for a range of alchemical and occult practices, historians have yet to integrate these occult activities with Mather's religious and scientific thought as a whole. I argue that we can bring clarity to Mather's engagement with the occult by refracting it through his reverence for Lutheran Pietist Johann Arndt, whose writings, especially Vier bucher vom wahren Christentum (Four Books of True Christianity), offer a key to Mather's employment of hermetic materials in his major works of natural philosophy. Through analysis of The Christian Philosopher and The Angel of Bethesda, as well as Mather's private writings, I suggest that Mather's cosmology was vitalistic in ways not previously acknowledged by historians. This view of creation as dynamic, enchanted, and marked by divine signatures—evidenced most clearly in Mather's concept of the nishmath-chajim—helped Mather reconcile the new science, Puritan covenant theology, and alchemical traditions descending from Paracelsus. By positing a divine, dynamic presence in nature, Mather retained an orthodox view of God as sovereign and transcendent while intimately engaged in a process of cosmic redemption, slowly transmuting the base matter of a fallen creation into a new heaven and new earth.

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) occupied an unusual position in the British Atlantic as an internationally minded voluntary organization rooted in Anglicanism but also able to unite members of different Protestant groups. Its history during the American Revolution provides opportunity to examine the ideal of international Protestantism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This investigation indicates that, despite many international ties and a strong sense of politically based international Protestant unity during the early decades of the century, members of the SPCK did not experience the Revolutionary crisis that ruptured the British Atlantic as a spiritual separation from their fellows in North America. International Protestant engagement within the SPCK was largely personal in nature, based on the experiences of a few individuals. Though the SPCK's regular publications create the impression of an organization leading an international Protestant community, an analysis of its membership reveals a profoundly English group. Thus, during the Revolution, the SPCK rallied to the British cause without a sense that an idealized Protestant union had been divided by fratricidal violence. This article builds on and supports the transnational perspective put forth by scholars in recent years and suggests that international Protestantism was varied and, in the case of the SPCK, politically limited.

In the history of the Atlantic antislavery movement, two events were of great importance: the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. In the 1730s and 1740s, many evangelicals stimulated by the religious revival, travelled to the opposite side of the Atlantic, preached the gospel, and published a number of books that contained their evangelical faith and ideals. Through these activities many evangelicals in Anglo-American communities shared common interests, faith, and ideology, and some found a channel of transatlantic communication in which they were able to debate the slavery issue. The American Revolution also contributed to creating an atmosphere of tension in the 1770s, in which antislavery sentiment became transformed into moral conviction. The development of this ideology can be explained by the spread of antipathy toward slavery in the Atlantic world before the Revolution. This essay focuses on the change in the evangelical mindset between these two religio-political events, asking: how did the antislavery sentiment spread through the transatlantic evangelical network from the 1740s into the 1770s?

Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entirely obscured in such portrayals is the agency of the militant separatist fundamentalists whose engagement with anticommunism was at once broader in scope, more systematic, organized and pervasive, and of significantly earlier lineage than that of their new evangelical rivals. The roots of the Christian Right do indeed lie in Cold War Christian anticommunism but the lines of influence stretch as much, if not more, from the fundamentalists gathered around the controversial pastor Carl McIntire and his American (and International) Council of Christian Churches as they do from the new evangelicals. A pivotal transitional figure who nurtured, renovated, and passed on to a new generation the anticollectivist public doctrines of the original fundamentalist movement. In his anticommunist work McIntire pioneered, as well, the faith-based mass demonstration and petition, the political use of Christian radio, and the lobbying of government officials that the later Christian Right perfected.

After Josephine Beckwith and DeLaris Johnson broke the color barrier at two southern missionary training schools in the 1940s and 50s, their religious vocations led them and other African American women on a trajectory of missionary service resonate with what we recognize today as civil rights activism. While histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, this article teases out the previously unexamined overlaps and connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s. In doing so, it bridges a disjuncture in African American women's religious history, illuminating the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black missionary women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories but are seen in historical continuity. In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism, a new vision and practice of mission for the civil rights era is revealed and our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.

The Netherlands is, besides the United States, one of the few countries where debates about creationism have been raging for decades. Strict creationism has become deeply rooted in traditional Reformed (Calvinist) circles, which is all the more remarkable as it stemmed from a very different culture and theological tradition. This essay analyses the historical implantation of this foreign element in Dutch soil by investigating the long-term interaction between American creationism and Dutch “neo-Calvinism,” a movement emerging in the late nineteenth century, which attempted to bring classical Calvinism into rapport with modern times. The heated debates about evolution in the interbellum period as well as in the sixties—periods characterized by a cultural reorientation of the Dutch Calvinists—turn out to have played a crucial role. In the interbellum period, leading Dutch theologians—fiercely challenged by Calvinist scientists—imported US “flood geology” in an attempt to stem the process of modernisation in the Calvinist subculture. In the sixties many Calvinists abandoned their resistance to evolutionary theory, but creationism continued to play a prominent role as the neo-Calvinist tradition was upheld by an orthodox minority, who (re-)embraced the reviving “Genesis Flood” creationism. The appropriation of American creationism was eased by the earlier Calvinist-creationist connection, but also by “inventing” a Calvinist-creationist tradition, suggesting continuity with the ideas of the founding fathers of neo-Calvinism. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of what Ronald L. Numbers has recently called the “globalization” of the “science-and-religion dialogue.”

This article sketches an archeology of the apocryphal myth of Santa Efigenia, the Ethiopian virgin saint celebrated in the southern coastal of valley of Cañete, Peru. The history of Santa Efigenia is used to analyze the invention of popular myths and processions in a rural community in contrast to the cornerstone of popular national religiosity in Peru, the Lord of the Miracles (Señor de los Milagros). The popular worship and diffusion of these devotions and processions intersect with the contested formation of national identity in early and late twentieth century Peru. Moreover, they speak to how traditional and popular forms of religious worship are valued and devalued.

The African diaspora in Peru and the Pacific coast of South America has been difficult to historicize because of the scant cultural evidence for an Afro-Andean nostalgia or separation from an African homeland. The rediscovery and devotion of Santa Efigenia and her emergent popularity in Peru and larger presence in Brazil and Cuba is compelling evidence that Afro-Peruvians have a direct connection with African culture and history and the early religious history of Catholic saints and virgins.