Although many scholars now recognize the turn of the millennium as the key point in the development of medieval civilization and the birth of Europe, there remains a tendency to look to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the period in which cultural and intellectual norms emerged that would define medieval civilization. This cultural flourishing, long ago recognized as a renaissance by Charles Henry Haskins, has, in recent years, taken on more ominous tones. Certainly this was a period of great intellectual fervor, but it was also, as R. I. Moore has shown, a time of persecution. Just as medieval theologians offered positive definitions of the Christian faith and Christian society, they defined the “other”—the enemy who stood in stark contrast to all that was true and good in society. And in Western Christendom there were no greater enemies than the Jew and the heretic. Indeed, it has generally been recognized that Jewish fortunes increasingly worsened during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In the century when heretics in the Netherlands were persecuted, the Dutch Revolt occurred, and events took place that ultimately led to the National Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19), religion and society were clearly interwoven. Research on this period is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, such as the one used, to remarkable effect, in the recent studies on the cities of the Reformation (Städteforschung). In the Netherlands, the study of the Reformation in urban settings has also become an important field, one in which both church and “secular” historians have made valuable contributions. Historical work on the period after the Synod of Dordrecht displays, however, far less interest in the relationship between religion and society. Despite this shift in historical focus, religion remained a formative factor in the public life of the Dutch Republic long after 1620. The established church retained its central position in society and continued to influence the design and the development of Dutch culture. The religious community regarded its norms as the basis of civil society. The church wanted to create a social practice in which religion played an influential role in urban life and in the ethics of everyday living.

When discussing the state of religion during the Soviet period, those following the traditional historical interpretation have held that the Communist Party successfully eradicated religion, particularly Russian Orthodoxy. While vestiges may have remained in rural areas, the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution was destroyed. Churches and monasteries stood in ruins as testaments to the victory of atheism over religion.

A teenage Catholic girl lies immobilized in her bed in Worcester, Massachusetts, her dark hair gathered in pink satin ribbons, her lacy nightgown spread neatly around her. The pleasing effect of a damsel in a pre-Raphaelite painting is broken by the sight of a tracheotomy tube in her neck attached to a ventilator, and a feeding tube in her stomach. For the last six years the American media has provided glimpses into the curious vegetative existence of Audrey Santo (1984–), who has lain in a coma-like state since a swimming pool accident at the age of three. Despite the girl's lack of consciousness and brain function, she has been credited as the conduit for extraordinary events in her home which have included bleeding hosts, stigmata, weeping statues, exuding walls, and physical healings. Audrey's popularity is largely a media creation, stemming from a 1996 televised documentary film about her on EWTN, a Christian broadcasting network in Alabama, which spawned a deluge of requests to the Santo family from people wanting to make a pilgrimage to see their daughter.

The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.

The theme of church and state in modern Europe lay well-situated within the positivist genre of historical study, which served as the dominant model in the profession for generations and in some sense still does. The keystone of the positivist edifice was the commitment to the universality of reason and the efficacy of reason in achieving definitive histories written by professional historians. The functioning of rationality in historical study was exemplified in the stream of history books about male elite subjects—politics, war, diplomacy, the institutions of the state and the church, and the ideas of canonical thinkers—which flowed from the pens of male European and North American academic historians since the late nineteenth century.