The charismatic renewal in the early 1960s was a significant development in global Christianity, creating theological and pastoral debates and disagreements with both local and international dimensions. This article sets the controversy between the leading Anglicans John Stott and Michael Harper within the wider cultural context that impacted the initial rise of the charismatic movement, and its subsequent growing global acceptance. The Stott-Harper debates contributed notably to the long-term domestication of the charismatic movement within an established Church, keeping most charismatic Anglicans within the Evangelical tradition. Conservative Evangelicals were enabled to adjust constructively to the growing ‘charismatisation’ of global Evangelicalism.

Scholars of late antique liturgy usually find the origins of baptismal imagery in the Bible and the daily life of early Christians. This article reveals that some metaphors, such as the ‘furnace’ image, may also come from pre-Christian literature. In ancient Greek and Mesopotamian sources, the female uterus is compared to a furnace. This article argues that, based on its use in pre-Christian literature, the furnace image might also be considered feminine. This image describes a broader range of activities in baptism than that ascribed to female agency until now and seems more empowering for today's women.

This article argues that we must look beyond Paolo Sarpi's infamous history of the Council of Trent to understand the culture of reading about the council in early modern Italy. We unearth prohibited works that garnered more attention from Rome than Sarpi's, and we show that these were widely read in multiple formats across Italy from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century. By recovering this history, we can see Sarpi's magnum opus in a new light: as one of many works that sought to make sense of the council, working within and around serious constraints.

Identity in nineteenth-century British imperial port cities throughout East and Southeast Asia was imprecise and fluid, shifting according to socio-political, cultural, and racial exigencies. Such port cities have historically been understood as contact zones, nodes within or on the edge of imperial networks, or else as “in-between spaces,” “bridges” between the maritime world of commerce and migration and the coastal hinterlands, across which goods, ideas, and people flowed.1 In line with recent scholastic shifts, the papers collected here revisit these paradigms by examining semi-colonial and colonial port cities connected to the British Empire through the experiences of understudied communities living and working far from their purported homelands.2 Building upon scholarly shifts away from analyses of East-meets-West encounters and towards explorations of the “multidirectionality” of interactions in colonial port cities, the case studies in this issue are grounded in the lived realities of distinct populations and their particular interactions with other port-city communities and (semi)colonial authorities.3 The transient, mobile, and interconnected nature of these colonial and semi-colonial littoral spaces allowed engagement and encounter to erode not just geopolitical borders through the forging of expansive and wide-reaching networks, but also the boundaries that governed the positionality of various ethnic and national communities.4

Preserved within the corpus of the East Roman polemicist Peter the Sicilian, several unassuming statements subtly contradict the historical consensus that the Paulicians espoused absolute dualism. According to their own testimony, rather than literally upholding two gods, as their Roman adversaries alleged, the Paulicians worshipped the heavenly Father but contended that the devil was merely a false god to whom the Romans were subject. This article therefore contributes to a broader critique of several received truths: that the Paulicians were absolute dualists, or dualists more generally, and that their thought informed that of later dualist groups.

This article examines Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ideas about historical objectivity and the craft of the historian. Drawing on a mix of published material and unpublished manuscript sources, it charts the evolution of the thinking of a key Irish public intellectual about how historians should write history and how their work should relate to their contemporary world. It identifies several unacknowledged intellectual debts O’Brien owed to influential twentieth-century thinkers — namely, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. The article challenges the claim that O’Brien’s view of historiography underwent significant changes in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. On the contrary, it is argued that O’Brien’s thinking on these themes remained fundamentally unchanged from the mid 1950s until the end of his long career as a public intellectual.