This article examines the day-to-day religious lives of Roman Catholic laywomen in the pre-Confederation Canadian Maritimes. Historical scholarship on the religious experiences of Atlantic Canadian women has been sparse and has addressed Protestants more often than Catholics. The rural Catholic Acadian laywomen of this study were builders of their spiritual experiences in both the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the church. Using the concepts of devotional labor and lived religion, this article foregrounds women’s material production and healing practices. I examine in close detail women from two parishes in southwestern Nova Scotia for which records survive. Women there influenced public experiences of worship by creating or obtaining the materials necessary for liturgical observances. Some laywomen were midwives and, in the frequent absences of priests, regularly baptized newborn children. All these women made do with their less-than-perfect circumstances, working to reconstruct their community’s spiritual integrity during a tenuous period of resettlement following the Acadian deportation.

As both substance and symbol, bread played a foundational role in the domestic and spiritual culture of Latin monasticism. Early medieval monks and nuns were expected to bake for themselves as part of their commitment to humility and self-sufficiency, and monastic rules and hagiography demonstrate that this daily bread was, like sacramental bread, a conduit for divine intercession. Monks’ participation in the eucharistic debates of the ninth to eleventh centuries reflected their spiritual formation in a Benedictine tradition that valued baking as spiritual labor and understood all bread to be potentially mutable and miraculous. From the eleventh century on, as the number of ordained monks grew and private masses proliferated in monastic churches, monastic customaries devoted considerable attention to the Eucharist’s evolving materiality and emphasized the monk-priest’s privileged status as a producer of holy matter. Regulatory texts also demonstrate that the rise of exacting new processes for confecting the host further eroded the fragile boundary between consecrated and unconsecrated bread in monasteries, with the latter becoming a focal point for concerns about purity, waste, and abuse that mirrored contemporary anxieties about the Eucharist.

This article analyzes the history of the campaign for the canonization of Christopher Columbus in the nineteenth century, the reformulation of the models of sainthood and, more generally, discourses that tried to explain the role of Catholicism in the development of Western civilization. I argue that the campaign was conceived as an apology for the contribution of Catholicism to the birth of the modern world and had, from its origins, a marked anti-Protestant character. Although the idea for the campaign originated in France, this campaign was characterized by its strong transnational dimension, involving Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic. In this sense, promoting a saint between two continents had a geopolitical dimension, reinforcing Rome’s connection with the Americas and, in particular, North America.

Why are cash waqfs administered and regulated by the state in some countries but by non-state entities in others? I present a twofold argument to explain this puzzle. First, colonial policies shaped the baseline framework for the regulation of religion, well into the postcolonial period. However, political actors in the postcolonial period then made specific choices within those regulatory frameworks, with implications for the administration and regulation of cash waqfs. In British India, legal arbitration became the primary framework for religious regulation. In postcolonial Bangladesh, successive governments politicized the bureaucracy as they prioritized survival, and so cash waqfs exist within the Islamic banking and finance sector. In British Malaya, local sultans were able to bureaucratize all aspects of Islam. The bureaucratization of Islam proceeded in a centripetal manner from the state to the federal level in postcolonial Malaysia, with the federal government taking charge of cash waqfs.

Both Ranters and Fifth Monarchists emerged as sectarian groups during the English Revolution, believing in an imminent apocalypse and the need for a total spiritual and social overhaul in England. Yet, their unique eschatologies resulted in dramatically different plans to overhaul the political and spiritual authorities in England. This article seeks to reassert the importance of scriptural citations in historical studies by arguing that the basis for these groups’ differences can be identified in the hermeneutical underpinnings of their millenarianism, and how their reading practices in turn informed their understanding of the apocalypse and their own political participation during the end times.