Scholars have long recognized that the theological arguments of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa against their opponent Eunomius helped to shape the development of Christian orthodoxy, and thus Christian self-definition, in the late fourth-century Roman Empire. The cultural and theological significance of the strong anti-Judaizing rhetoric contained within these Cappadocian authors’ anti-Eunomian treatises, however, remains largely unexamined. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the critical role of anti-Judaizing rhetoric in the arguments that early Christian leaders Athanasius of Alexandria and Ephrem of Nisibis used against “Arian” Christian opponents in the middle of the fourth century, and the implications of this rhetoric for understanding early Christian-Jewish and intra-Christian relations. Scholars have yet to recognize, however, that anti-Judaizing rhetoric similarly helped to define the terms and consequences of the anti-Eunomian arguments made by Basil, Gregory, and Gregory in the decades that followed. The anti-Judaizing rhetoric of their texts attests to the continuing advantages that these leaders gained by rhetorically associating their Christian opponents with Jews. By claiming that Eunomius and his followers were too Jewish in their beliefs to be Christian, and too Christian in their behaviors to be Jewish, Basil, Gregory, and Gregory deployed anti-Judaizing rhetoric to argue that Eunomians were significantly inferior to both true Christians and Jews. The Cappadocians’ strategic comparisons with Jews and Judaism rhetorically distanced their Eunomian opponents from Christianity and thus strengthened the Cappadocians’ own claims to represent Christian orthodoxy.

What could it mean to a medieval monastic community to own a valuable object? Certainly, property in general was crucial to the survival of a stable community, ideals of poverty and the thirteenth-century Franciscan experiment in radical poverty notwithstanding. More specifically, what did it mean to own not simply a field or mill that generated revenue, but an object that was believed to have power beyond its material qualities? Such objects—saints’ relics and wonder-working images—did of course also generate revenue, but their meaning and role for the monastic community and the wider society could be much richer than that. And what if the monastic community was a convent of nuns, of professed religious women whose lives were shaped not just by the rule they shared with their male counterparts, but also by the codes, both implicit and increasingly explicit, that constrained the range of women's religious activities?

Although the first two of these questions—about monastic property and the religious value of sacred objects—have been extensively discussed in scholarship on the Middle Ages, a specific focus on gender in relation to monastic ownership of sacred objects has not been widely examined. My focus on gender here is generated by two salient aspects of religious life in the twelfth century, the period of this study. First, there was an increasing articulation of the priesthood as the sole means of mediating divine presence, and of that priesthood as exclusively male.

In 1844, the Congregationalist minister Enoch Pond in Bangor, Maine, reminded his fellow clergy that they had been commissioned not only to feed the sheep of their flocks but also to nurture the lambs. Under no circumstances, he cautioned, would a good minister neglect the children, for both Christian parents and their pastors felt “the deepest anxiety” that the children of American parishes would not “receive that wise government, that faithful discipline, that Christian instruction and restraint, which, by the blessing of God, shall result in their speedy conversion, and bring them early and truly into the fold of Christ.” He called for pastors to pray for the children, to convene meetings of praying parents, to pay attention to children during pastoral visits, to impart special instruction to children from the pulpit, to visit their schools, to institute Sunday schools, to teach children the Bible, and to offer catechetical instruction. The devoted pastor would acquaint himself with children, “enter into their feelings, and interest himself in their affairs; and thus engage their affections, and win their confidence.“

Christian clergy in America had long heeded such admonitions. Seventeenth-century Puritan ministers made serious, if sporadic, efforts to teach the catechism, often invited groups of children into their homes for instruction, contended over the implications of the baptismal covenant, and urged parents to teach their offspring religious truths and Christian practices. Eighteenth-century Anglican clergy made similar efforts to instruct children, and their revivalist counter-parts in New England and the Middle Colonies encouraged the conversion of children at younger than customary ages. Jonathan Edwards devoted careful attention to his four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet, who followed in the path of her converted eleven-year-old brother by announcing, after anguished prayers and cries for mercy, that “the kingdom of God had come” to her.

Because Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dreams of a visible Zion in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and negotiations with non-Mormons. In their attempts to convert, resist, or appease outsiders, Mormons have engaged in a distinctive dialectic of secrecy and self-disclosure, of esoteric rites and public relations. The result has been an extended process of controlled modernization.

Narratives of this process have focused on the 1890 “Manifesto” of LDS President and Prophet Wilford Woodruff, the momentous declaration that Latter-day Saints must cease to contract plural marriages. The Manifesto put an end to the intense federal persecution of the 1880s, when government agents imprisoned or exiled husbands of plural wives, confiscated Mormon assets, abolished Utah women's right to vote, and secularized Mormon schools. President Woodruff's truce with the federal government brought Mormons a relative peace and an important sign of acceptance: the granting of statehood to Utah in 1896.

Historian Wallace Best argues in his Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (2005) that historically “we have been more accustomed to think of religion as spontaneous and supernatural.” Best maintains that we have seen religion as “something that happens—outside of human control and irrespective of social context.” He wants to challenge this conception of religion by emphasizing the active production of a new religious culture by black Americans in Chicago in the early twentieth century. The agency of lower- and working-class blacks is what Best emphasizes in his rich analysis of religion and culture in black Chicago. Although it is not clear who the “we” is in Best's analysis because he does not cite any sources on this point, I do not quite see things the way that he does. As I will demonstrate in this essay, the historiography on African American religion has not posited a static or “supernatural” conception of religion. What strikes me about the history of interpretations of African American religion is the way in which interpreters have asserted that peoples of African descent were “naturally religious,” which meant that their religion was a product of biology and nature rather than of the “supernatural.” Generally, white interpreters in the early twentieth century set the terms of the debate by arguing that blacks were naturally religious and thus unable to compete in a modern industrial world. The political and social force of such arguments has been keenly observed by black interpreters, who were eager to offer in response a more socially progressive notion of black religion in order to enlist black churches in social reform, to counter images of blacks as inhibited by nature or biology from contributing to the cultural vitality of the nation, and to insist that black religion changed in response to social circumstances (and hence the common claim in the 1940s that it was very much a product, if not an epiphenomenon, of their economic and political condition).