This article delves into the often-overlooked scholar Robert Greene, a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who authored works in both religion and natural philosophy. Greene made significant contributions to the debate on the interplay between reason and faith, with his primary target being John Locke, whose epistemology and views on the relationship between reason and faith he considered detrimental to religion. This article examines Greene’s criticism of Locke’s views on the relationship between reason and faith within its institutional context, shedding new light on Locke’s early reception at the University of Cambridge.

The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.

Howard Thurman, the great 20th-century African American thinker and pastor, has often been characterized as holding an antagonistic view of the Apostle Paul, based primarily on several passages in his most important work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). One of those passages describes the anti-Pauline position of his grandmother, a former slave, Nancy Ambrose. In this article we argue that Thurman was, in contrast to his grandmother, oftentimes an admirer of Paul. Our thorough consideration of Thurman’s published and unpublished work, as well as the work of his various intellectual and religious mentors, uncovers that he had a much more nuanced position on Paul than is normally described. He saw Paul as a profoundly radical and original thinker, who was nonetheless compromised by his Roman citizenship, distancing himself from his fellow Jews. For Thurman, a mentor to many in the civil rights movement, the question of citizenship was crucial, and he used Paul to help explore the complex intellectual, religious, and social situations of African Americans, caught between two worlds, ambivalent about trying to fit into a world that was ambivalent about them. In this way, for Thurman, Paul was a model of personal struggle and religious complexity.