In 1709, William Freke, a pious, well-educated, and well-read English gentleman living in Dorset, declared to the world that he was the second coming of Elijah, sent to announce the arrival of the New Jerusalem and to proclaim the beginning of Christ's reign upon earth. There is no evidence to indicate that anyone at the time took him seriously, and given this absence of contemporary interest, it might be tempting to dismiss Freke as an isolated and insignificant crackpot. But this would be a misreading of his career. Research over the past couple of decades has decisively determined that the twenty years following 1690 were a period of intense religious speculation in England and the larger Atlantic world when expectations of the millennium were high. Far from being an isolated enthusiast crying in the wilderness, Freke was in fact a prophet who was connected in a variety of ways to a much larger network of religious enthusiasts in England and on the Continent that reveals much about the religious milieu of, and the millenarian interconnections that existed during, the last decade of the seventeenth and first decade of the eighteenth century.

A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it “the Protestant consensus.” John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the civic language of consensus, Modern describes his formation as an “atmosphere,” a kind of conceptual cloud-hanging so thickly in the air that antebellum Americans inhaled it with every breath. This pervasive atmosphere is what Modern means by “the secular.”

This article examines the biography of a twelfth-century English holy woman, the Life of Christina of Markyate—particularly its account of a vision that she had in which she was crowned in the likeness of a bishop's miter—within the context of campaigns undertaken by English monasteries in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to obtain the papal privilege of full exemption from the sacramental and juridical control of their diocesan bishop. Reading Christina's vision in view of the bids for independence made by St. Albans—the community responsible for commissioning and writing her biography—especially helps to shed light on why the Life seems to figure her in a distinctly episcopal cast. Significantly, the Life's account of this vision may have been shaped by a miniature cycle of the passion and miracles of St. Edmund, produced by Bury circa 1125, seemingly in an effort to provide further confirmation of the abbey's exempt status. In a miniature depicting Edmund's apotheosis, the saint divinely receives a miter-like crown, which is nearly identical in its ornamentation to the one that Christina would later receive. Ultimately under investigation in this article is whether St. Albans' campaign for exemption was one of the influences dictating the composition of the Life of Christina.

Our fellow historian Peter Brown reports that according to a memoir written, sometime around 1900 by a contemporary of Benedetto Croce, the eminent Italian philosopher, Croce challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysics. What a startling report that makes you eager to turn the page—as in a John Gresham volume—in order to find out what happened. But nothing more is said in the book, compelling the conclusion that for the author, this was routine, unimportant, and even normal for professors to challenge each other to deadly duels. He must have thought that no explanation was necessary. And so a single sentence stands alone, tantalizing, unexplained—for contemporaries commonplace; for posterity altogether startling. What a splendid introduction to how to see the past offered us by Peter Brown!

In the spring of 1831, Methodist minister John Price Durbin delivered an evangelical sermon that assumed his listeners were familiar with the basic rules of science. “Are planetary worlds seen revolving in their orbits harmoniously and steadily?” he asked his rural Kentucky audience. “Is a little microscopic insect seen in the dust, or in the down of a peach, or in a drop of water?” The answer, of course, was yes—though Durbin saw no need to say so. His questions were merely rhetorical; the Methodists listening to his sermon knew, after all, that planetary worlds and microscopic insects existed, even if not all of them had had the opportunity to see these natural phenomena firsthand. Scientists had proved that the phenomena existed, and in 1831, the authority of science was to be trusted.

The earliest extant sources of Syrian Christianity reveal a powerful spirit of self-consciousness for independence. This desire is imprinted on every page of the historical records. That which stands at the very forefront of Tatian's thought is profoundly instructive for our purposes: it is his dislike, nay more his hatred, fore everything bearing a Greek or Roman label. This spirit shows itself in whatever direction we look. Syrian gnosis is the least hellenized of all. The pattern of Christian life carries its own attributes of sovereignty in every respect. Autonomy is the hallmark of the early Syrian conception of the church. Theological thought travels along quite independent lines in accord with that genius—even in the works of Aphrahat written decades after the Council of Nicea.

In the American self-consciousness from its beginning to the present there has existed a firm conviction that this nation is destined, either by divine decree or circumstances, for a unique place among the peoples of the earth. One form of this is the assumption that the United States will provide the great example which others will want to follow. The classic expression of this was given by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, but equally valid ones can be found in the words of modern Americans. Winthrop said:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

The libelous depiction of King Chilperic I (561–584) and his wife Fredegund in Gregory of Tours' Decem Libri Historiarum has encouraged the false impression of these Merovingian monarchs as scourges of the Gallo-Frankish Church and its bishops. If fact, evidence from Gregory's own writings, as well as from other contemporary sources, reveals that Chilperic and Fredegund were generous patrons of ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and cults. A prosopographical database of seventeen episcopal supporters of Chilperic and Fredegund is used to evaluate the means by which the royal couple attracted and maintained episcopal support. The patronage by the royal couple of saint cults and their associated institutions also is examined. It is concluded that Chilperic and Fredegund's ecclesiastical policies are less responsible for their posthumous reputations than the choices that they made in distributing their patronage.

Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were strikingly different. Before removal, Cherokee printers emulated Anglo-Protestant prototypes in terms of dimensions, layout, and typography. The goal was to increase the likelihood of staying on their lands by winning white patrons and nudging Cherokee readers to see themselves as acculturated reading subjects. After removal, Cherokee printers rethought acculturation as a strategy. They redesigned Poor Sarah to turn away from white audiences and instead address the Cherokee community and its needs. Attention to the evolving materialities of Poor Sarah reveals Cherokee Christian printing as a key site of Indigenous media theory and part of Cherokee Nation's repertory of political action in response to US imperialism and settler colonialism.

The Carolingian period, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries, was dynamic and decisive in European religious history. The ruling dynasty and the clerical elite promoted wave after wave of reform that I call “unifying,” “specifying,” and “sanctifying.” This presidential address argues that religion was the key unifying and universalizing force in the Carolingian world; that the Carolingians were obsessed with doing things the right way—usually the Roman way; and that the Carolingians sought to inculcate Christian behavior more than religious knowledge. The address concludes by arguing that the Carolingians put a markedly European stamp on Christianity and that they Romanized Christianity well before the papacy attempted to do so.

The month of December 1816 found Schleiermacher thinking about too many things at once and not at all in the best of health. To his friend Gass, who seemed to have no trouble combining scholarship with administration, he sent a plea for help:

I have long been bent upon making just some superficial patristic and scholastic studies, in order to gather a few handy quotations for my dogmatics; and I never got around to it. I would be very much obliged if you would write me somewhat more exactly how you have gone about it and on what [passages] you have chiefly relied.

A preliminary word should be said about the propriety of the use of the late, twentieth-century term “pacifism” to apply to the peace doctrines of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. As it has been used since World War I pacifism designates broadly an idealistic anti-militarist position whose goal is the elimination of war in history.

Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877) was one of the few nineteenth-century American scholars committed to disseminating German methods of ecclesiastical historiography to a country known for its anti-historical tendencies. However, modern scholars have generally overlooked his significant contributions in this area. Hence exploring his scholarly reception and specifically his History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables will fill a niche in the historiography of church history.

Philip Schaff (1819–1893), the renowned church historian and founder of the American Society of Church History, was one of the few contemporaries of Smith who understood that Smith's scholarship was on a par with that being produced in Germany. Schaff specifically praised Smith's chronological tables—evidence of Smith's German education among some of the best German historians of the period, including Leopold von Ranke and August Neander. This essay reviews Smith's History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables in the context of the newly emerging scientific history and describes his contribution to nineteenth-century American scholarship. Smith is worthy of attention for establishing a central position for the history of doctrine and for promoting the field of church history and the use of chronological tables in nineteenth-century America.

When the twenty–two year old Andronicos II (1282–1328) acceded to the throne of Byzantium, the empire was in a state of political, social, and ecclesiastical decline. This paper will consider the attempts of Patriarch Athanasios I to reverse this process of decay and to eliminate foreign religious elements from the capital of the Orthodox Byzantine empire. In 1261, the Byzantine empire had been restored to its capital, Constantinople, after fifty-seven years of Latin occupation. The city, however, had declined sadly from its former glory. The area of its effective hegemony was reduced to sections of western Anatolia and Greece, some islands in the Aegean, and Byzantine Thrace. Even this pitiful remnant was subject to the continuing assaults of the Turks, the pillaging of Catalan mercenaries turned hostile, the exploitation of Latin merchants, and threats of a Western military adventure to restore a Latin kingdom and Church of Constantinople.