Exploring the range of circumstances in which medieval Christians laughed with, against, at, and through religious topics, this article investigates four objects: an ivory cross, an ampulla of a saint's blood, a preaching codex, and a pilgrim's badge. While these objects are taken to illustrate a diversity of attitudes to religious humor, they are also, in light of recent work citing the productive power of medieval matter, scrutinized as agents in their own right. The article suggests two significant patterns. On the one hand, the objects point to laughter's use as a unique mode of spiritual practice. Through amusing miracles, through the provocative work of comic sermons, and through the playful humor of pilgrimage badges, Christians from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries were able to use humor to relate to their faith in sophisticated and often counterintuitive ways. Yet as the four objects and their use also attest, these modes of comic relation were also subjected to clerical reduction and regulation. Harnessing the pedagogical potential of laughter especially, preachers, hagiographers, and clerics all worked to redirect more anarchic forms of religious humor toward functional ends. While tracing how laughter with Christian topics was increasingly encouraged, the article suggests that the price of this encouragement was that laughter was often brought into a more policed domain of orthodox Christian practice.

Jacob van Liesvelt, an Antwerpian printer, was executed in 1545 for publishing without the consent of the authorities. His sad story has been retold throughout the centuries. In an early Protestant tradition, it was argued that Van Liesvelt died because of certain Reformation-minded marginal notes contained in the Bible of 1542, an argument that has been continuously elaborated upon over the years, giving rise to the myth of Van Liesvelt as the martyr of the Word of God. This article critically questions the story of Van Liesvelt's execution, showing ways to “debunk” the myth. However, in her book Pragmatic Toleration (2015), the American scholar Victoria Christman reworks a theory earlier put forward in an article in The Sixteenth Century Journal (2011), building on the Van Liesvelt myth from husband to widow. She argues that the latter, Maria Ancxt, simply continued her husband's Protestant Bible production, uninhibited by his terrifying fate and without experiencing any form of judicial censure. This essay, in contrast, presents a painstaking study of Ancxt's entire Bible production, which firmly arrives at the conclusion that it was largely Catholic in character—although Ancxt explored the boundaries of what was possible—and that this is the reason why she was never disturbed by the authorities. This essay, therefore, also includes more general remarks on confessionally or ideologically colored history writing—in the past and present—while exploring its boundaries.

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

This essay offers an interpretation of certain sections of the American abolitionist movement before the Civil War. It posits that many antebellum opponents of slavery and enslaved people alike subscribed to a theory of Christianity that, following Scottish common-sense theology and the experiential, liberation-oriented Christianity of the enslaved, maintained that morality and immorality were equally comprehensible and perceivable to all humanity. When, therefore, reports of physical violence and oppression wreaked upon enslaved people in the South began circulating in the North, the conclusion that slavers must be atheists who were not truly practicing Christianity united both black Christians and white Unitarians in a common critique of slavery. The accusation that slaveholding was a form of atheism lent weight to common fears that slavery was a form of tyranny undermining the potential of American democracy among Northern Americans.

On first examination, “muscular Christianity”—with its emphasis on manly vigor and physical strength—positions itself well afield of Christian Science teachings on the non-physical basis of existence, as propounded by founder Mary Baker Eddy. Nonetheless, both movements arose in the nineteenth century with a deep commitment to revitalizing Christianity and its practical value in an increasingly scientific and secular age, especially regarding bodily well-being. Both Eddy and advocates of muscular Christianity defended their respective systems on scientific and religious grounds, focusing on questions of health. At a time when the Young Men's Christian Association was a leading exponent of muscular Christianity, Eddy saw fit to give it significant philanthropic support. While her gift reflected civic goodwill as opposed to a close relationship with the Association, I argue that it was not anomalous to Eddy's overall values and vision for Christian Science. Like muscular Christians, Eddy was calling for a progressive Christianity that met the criteria of a pragmatic age. In giving attention to issues around manhood, Eddy was signaling the necessity as well as potentiality of Christian spirituality to be a source of health and empowerment for modern man.