The idea and the ideal of religious poverty exerted a powerful force throughout the Middle Ages. “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff,” Christ had commanded his apostles. He had sternly warned, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for someone who is rich to enter into the kingdom of God.” And he had instructed one of the faithful, who had asked what he needed to do to live the most holy sort of life, “if you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give your money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” Beginning with these biblical injunctions, voluntary poverty, the casting off of wealth and worldly goods for the sake of Christ, dominated much of medieval religious thought. The desire for a more perfect poverty impelled devout men and women to new heights of piety, while disgust with the material wealth of the church fueled reform movements and more radical heresies alike. Often, as so clearly illustrated by the case of the Spiritual Franciscans and fraticelli in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the lines separating devout believer from condemned heretic shifted and even reversed themselves entirely depending on how one understood the religious call to poverty. Moreover, the Christian ideal of poverty interacted powerfully with and helped to shape many major economic, social, and cultural trends in medieval Europe. As Lester Little demonstrated over two decades ago, for example, developing ideals of religious poverty were deeply intermeshed with the revitalizing European economy of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and did much to shape the emerging urban spirituality of that period.

The nineteenth-century editor of Ermenrich of Ellwangen's (ca. 814–74) Vita Sualonis, Oswald Holder-Egger, dismissed the Carolingian hagiographer's sermon on the Anglo-Saxon hermit Sualo as historically unimportant because of its heavy reliance on oral traditions, its turgid prose style, and its clumsy Latin grammar. Holder-Egger found fault with the “ahistoricism” of Ermenrich's Vita—a scholarly stance no doubt influenced by the historicism of his day that privileged “the basic story as the primary object or goal of research.” For the late-nineteenth century, the recovery and reconstruction of an original source (an archetype or Urtext) from which all other derivative and secondary versions sprang was the ultimate task of historical inquiry. Such an Urtext, once unearthed, would then present the true, uncontaminated story of what had happened in the past, and the historian who successfully excavated an Urtype would assume the role of truth teller.

In his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1920, Robert Hastings Nichols observed that he had discovered, in his reading of previous addresses, “no mention of the reading of a paper dealing with what is the occupation of almost half of our members, the teaching of Church History,” or, as he preferred to call it, the teaching of “Christianity in History.” He decided, therefore, to talk about pedagogy. He devoted most of his address to answering the question why history should be taught in the theological seminary, arguing that it trained students to weigh evidence, calculate motives, trace causes, and estimate the power of social movements. It nurtured a certain kind of intellectual and moral capacity.

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

In the early part of the fourteenth century, a parish priest in Brussels came into the possession of a manuscript containing the vernacular letters, visions, and poetry of a woman known only as “beata Hadewijch.” The priest prized the manuscript, even recommending it to his fellow conventuals decades later, and included its primary tropes of courtly love mysticism (Minnemystik) as an essential part of many of his writings on the active, interior, and contemplative ways to mystical union. This local priest turned canon regular, Jan van Ruusbroec (1292–1381), has been celebrated for centuries for his Trinitarian theology, for his speculative or essence mysticism, and for his negative theology—but Ruusbroec's reliance on Hadewijch's metaphor of courtly love has only recently become a subject of scholarly study. An examination of the parallels between Hadewijch and Ruusbroec's theology, a heavily Trinitarian theology conveyed by means of the metaphor of Minne, not only serves to expand our comprehension of their theologies, but also provides a unique perspective on the religious experience of medieval men and women.

Historical narrations of the Gregorian Reform tend to cultivate a certain machismo. The traditional narrative emphasizes a struggle for dominance between two men, Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV, which escalated from epistolary sparring to armed combat and culminated in a dramatic scene in which one man was on his knees before the other at Canossa. Even the newer narratives, such as the late Karl Leyser's “Gregorian Revolution,” while highlighting broad social and religious transformations attendant upon the movement, still privilege a revolutionary cadre, a handful of reformers (all male, of course) gathered around Gregory VII, who artfully channeled the discontents of the masses into a permanent reordering of western society.

Episcopal election in Western Christianity evolved considerably over the course of the fifth to the twelfth centuries. In the early part of this period, an open electorate consisting of the clergy and the people (clerus et populus), as well as the diocesan clergy and the metropolitan archbishop, all took part in the election and consecration of a new bishop. Over the course of several centuries, the local prince came increasingly to dominate the process due both to Germanic and Roman traditions of the role of the prince and to the growth in power of the local rulers over the course of the Middle Ages. Efforts to harmonize the discordant views of a “democratic” versus an elite (either princely or clerical) electorate with the ideals of canon law, which forbade lay participation in episcopal election, led to assertions that the clergy were to elect the bishop with the people and the prince giving their assent to the bishop-elect. However, with the Gregorian reforms of the twelfth century, the right of the clergy in episcopal elections became preeminent as the reformers sought to enforce the canon laws and exclude the laity from episcopal election, especially in light of past princely abuse. Despite the apparent victory of the reformers in the Investiture Controversy, the local ruler continued to play a preeminent role in episcopal appointments (or elections) into modern times, though the principle of election “by the clergy and the people” fell into disuse.

In 1873 an exhausted Catholic priest who had completed a successful mission reported to his bishop. Pleased with his priest's achievement, the bishop mused, “now that they are all in the grace of God, drown them in the river before they lose it.” How should we interpret this joke? It plays upon the belief that earthly life pales in importance to life after death. Even a cruel end such as drowning would be a small price to pay for eternal life. The joke also toys with the burdensome duties of the missionary as a supernatural agent of redemption. A mission demands exhausting days of preaching, exhortation, prayer, hearing confessions, and offering the Eucharist. The task, to lead sinners toward a state of grace, is onerous. So bishop and priest chuckle together. Murdering the laity—at the proper moment, before they sin again—would ease their pastoral load.

The Cathedral of St. Étienne at Bourges, which Ribault justly styles “un chef d'oeuvre gothique” (a Gothic masterpiece), did not escape the Huguenot depredations of 1562. Especially vulnerable to the pikes and pry-bars of the Reformers were the choir screen in front of the main altar, the north and south doorways commemorating respectively Mary in Majesty and Christ in Majesty, and several areas of the West facade: the jamb statues (whose subjects are currently unknown), the spandrel sculptures under the dado that celebrated events of the Christian scriptures and of the book of Genesis, and the five extensively carved tympana dedicated from right to left as one faces them:

Scholars of the Middle Ages have established that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was an intellectual shift in the Christian polemic against Islam. Whereas in earlier centuries heresiologists defined Islam as pagan, in the high Middle Ages the prevailing opinion emerged that it was instead a heresy. Medieval writers, who drew upon a rich theological tradition dating to the patristic era, sustained and expanded this new perspective. Many of the patristic theological refutations against heretics proved once again useful as groups such as the Waldensians, Albigensians, and others made serious challenges against the dominant orthodoxy. Even though Islam had already been a formidable presence in the Mediterranean—especially since the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century—in the high Middle Ages the continued expansion of Islam, including its defeat of the Crusaders, was perceived to be an increased threat to Christendom. A corollary development was the greater interest in Islam—mainly to discredit or refute it—by some leading western Christian theologians. One thing is certain: medieval writers were intent on demonstrating the heretical nature of Islamic doctrines and the perversity of Islamic morality. Medieval polemicists, however, resorted to a standard theological weapon to assault Islam, typology. Through typology medieval writers were capable of constructing alleged historical and doctrinal links between Muhammad and two of the most notorious “types” of heresy from early Christianity: Simon Magus and Nicolas of Antioch.

Horst Kunze, the contemporary German authority on indexing, writes, “An index is not a tool that has its own independent existence. It is an aid for the use of another literary object. It is like a signpost. Like a signpost it has no other purpose than to point the way in certain directions.” Indices seldom attract scholarly investigation. Casual users accept the index as a more or less objective guide to the contents of a book. However, the index prepared in 1580 for the initial publication of the Book of Concord, appearing in several of its first printings, was designed to point in specific directions, to cultivate a particular way for its primary audience to read the volume and put it to use. It took the form of loci communes—topics—as they had been developed a generation earlier by Martin Luther's Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon for the proper, fruitful, study of theology. By selecting the doctrinal topics and categories into which pastors and teachers were to organize the content of this volume for their own use, this index offers one of the first theological commentaries on the Book of Concord. The index also reveals how Melanchthon's theological method continued to dominate the way the heirs of the Wittenberg Reformation thought—in spite of the fact that it directs readers away from and against the theology of some of Melanchthon's followers whom scholars have dubbed with his name, “Philippists.” (In fact, some contemporaries objected to the Book because they believed it to be anti-Melanchthonian.)

In the summer of 1756, Jonathan Edwards preached a simple yet extraordinary sermon to his Indian congregation at Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he had served as missionary for five years. He counseled his listeners that God “advises us to be friends to our own souls” by seeking after holiness. Edwards encouraged his Indian congregants to take tender care of their souls, to “forsake wickedness and seek after Holiness” and not to “act the part of Enemies of Enemies [sic] to your soul.“ This sermon could scarcely have been more different from one delivered to a gathering of the town's English children just a month earlier, in which Edwards railed at them that he would “rather go into Sodom and preach to the men of Sodom than preach to you and should have a great deal more hopes of success.” In this same sermon, Edwards demanded, “should I now think it worthy of my while to preach to you … were it not that I knew that God is almighty and he can make the word pierce your hearts tho' it be harder than a rock?”

The modern idea that to converse means to talk, to exchange ideas with another person, emerged between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Before that time, and throughout the Middle Ages, conversatio was a state of being or a way of life. To converse was to commune with God or other people, particularly in the context of religious communities. John Bossy says that this definitional shift from conduct to dialogue is one indication of how Christianity changed from a medieval system that promoted communal solidarity into a modern religion that emphasized morality and civility. John O'Malley similarly underscores the importance of the new meaning of conversation by pointing out that one of the Jesuit innovations was to make conversation a “ministry of the word” practiced in and through confession and spiritual exercises. But how did contemporaries experience the transformation of conversation from “togetherness” to “dialogue”? Apart from the Jesuit practices, do we have any way of discerning whether sixteenth-century Christians experienced conversation as a religious praxis?

For the American Puritan minister Increase Mather, the battle of Armageddon would be “the most terrible day of battel that ever was.” “Asia is like to be in a flame of war between Israelites and Turks,” he wrote in The Mystery of Israel's Salvation, “[and] Europe between the followers of the Lamb and the followers of the beast.” In the Asian and European spheres of action, or so Mather anticipated, God's Israelite and Protestant armies would “overthrow great Kingdoms, and make Nations desolate, and bring defenced Cities into ruinous heaps.” The inevitable victory would reshape the course of history, for the destruction of Roman Catholic and Ottoman power would be accompanied by the conversion of the Jews and the lost tribes of Israel to Christianity and by their restoration to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Then would come the birth of the millennium in Jerusalem and the subsequent spread of the kingdom of Jesus Christ throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world.

Reflections on historiographical developments in the history of Christianity tend to be a rather dry matter. Though dry, however, such reflections are important, since historiographical emphases not only tell us where scholarship has been in the past, but also—since we are directed to look at the longe durée—why we are where we are. Historians tend to be, alas, a herd of independent minds, and there are vogues in scholarship no less than there are in haute couture. A generation ago, few historians used such terms as “discourse,” “construction,” “close reading,” “intertextuality” even as monographs—even splendid monographs—on a burgomaster's daughter would have issued only from the pen of a secondary school teacher in Germany.

In the last public act before his death, Benjamin Franklin parodied a proslavery speech in Congress by comparing it to a fictitious proslavery address “anno 1687” by a North African Muslim, a pirate named Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. Like proslavery southerners, the Algerian argued that he could not countenance the end of Christian slavery because it would hurt the interests of the Algerian state, there would be no way to compensate the Muslim slave masters, and nothing could safely be done with the freed slaves. Franklin's salvo against slavery was published in 1790 in major northern newspapers. His use of Muslims and Islamic images is one of the most famous in eighteenth-century America, but not unique. Islamic references pepper the public documents of early America, demonstrating that many were not only aware of the religion but also ready to use it as a rhetorical tool of argument. A close look at the uses of Islam in Anglo-American writing before 1800 shows that Franklin's use of the proslavery argument was another version of a well-established tradition: citing the similarities between an opponent's views and the “beliefs” of Islam as a means to discredit one's adversaries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, rhetorical uses of Islam became increasingly secularized. Early in the century, Islam was typically used for religious purposes in religious debates while later commentators often took knowledge “derived” from observations of despotic Islamic states to support political points. Although one should hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam, they certainly conversed about Islam regularly.

A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage “a great crime against civilization and Christianity.” At the age of seventy-two, Goode was the grand old man of the convention. A graduate of the University of Virginia and life-long Democrat, he had served in the state legislature, the Secession Convention of 1861, the Confederate legislature, and the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment as Solicitor General of the United States in 1885. Goode reflected the mentality of the vast majority of convention delegates when he stated that African Americans were incapable of education or citizenship. “The omniscient Ruler of the Universe … made [them] inferior,” he proclaimed, and sometime in the future, when the North knew better, the Fifteenth Amendment would be repealed.

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541), one of the most prolific authors of the Reformation, is one of the most difficult for historians to classify. He produced about ninety published writings, which were printed in about 213 editions. “Among evangelical authors during the years 1518–1525, Karlstadt, after Martin Luther (1483–1546), published the largest number of works in German; and, after Luther's, his works had the second-largest number of editions.” Indeed, on these grounds “it is a safe assumption that Karlstadt's activities as a publicist had a major impact.” Yet during several years of his career, his writings had to be printed and read secretly. He even gave up his academic responsibilities for a time. However, his battles against images and, later, against Luther's doctrine of the Lord's Supper, both influenced the whole course of the Reformation in Germany and beyond.

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.