This article explores the conspicuous role of singing in the hagiographical construction of saintly women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. The constellation of Lives about Liégeois women occupies a prominent place in the “origin story” of the new spirituality in the later Middle Ages. However, one aspect of these women's perceived religiosity—their musical and vocal talent—though omnipresent in the sources, has received only sparse attention from scholarship. This article focuses on two of the most important Lives in this group, those of Mary of Oignies and Christina of Sint-Truiden, and demonstrates that hagiographers, mobilizing liturgical vocabulary and ritual ideas identifiable to a local audience, consistently represented women's singing as magnificent ritual performance. By doing so, the hagiographers highlighted these women's privileged access to the divine and distinct potency as intercessors for the living and the dead. This article also intends to show the highly sophisticated ways in which Latin liturgy and its vernacular appropriation, popular ideas and scholastic theories about music were negotiated, developed, and together contributed to a distinctive religious rhetoric in the articulation of female sanctity in thirteenth-century Europe.

Recent studies of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch have helpfully located seventeenth-century Ignatian scholarship in its ecclesial and political context. Of particular importance, these new works have demonstrated that seventeenth-century British analysis of the genuineness of Ignatius's letters coincided with debates about British ecclesial government and the English Civil War. This essay contributes to such studies by expanding the discussion in three ways. The first two ways extend the study of Ignatian reception backward from the seventeenth century. First, the article observes that the study of the middle recension (the earliest form of Ignatius's letters) can be found in late medieval English theological writings and manuscripts. Second, it addresses how, simultaneously, four Ignatian letters which record a correspondence between Ignatius, John the Elder, and the Virgin Mary were read in Britain. These letters highlight Ignatius's piety and apostolic links. Finally, this essay widens the scholarly narrative of seventeenth-century Ignatian studies by observing that seventeenth-century interpreters drew on late medieval citations of Ignatius and that they were concerned with Ignatius's piety as well as the interpretive puzzles in his letters.

Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ “opened the womb” of his mother—an action many readers equate with destruction of virginity. How can Origen claim that Mary remained virginal if her hymen tissue was no longer intact? Scholars commonly solve the problem by characterizing his thought as self-contradictory or by concluding that he prioritizes Mary's lack of sexual experience over her loss of physical intactness. This essay resolves the contradiction more fully through attention to divergent models for female genital anatomy that circulated in antiquity. Origen, like most thinkers during and before his time, probably did not believe that female virgins have hymens. For him, the terminology of “closed” and “opened” wombs refers not to virginity but to fertility. Scholarly readers have been misled by certain other authors’ uses of this vocabulary and by Jerome's Latin translation of the homily, which draws on a different anatomical model. For Origen, Mary is a virginal mother not in spite of a broken hymen, but without possessing a hymen in the first place.

Exploring the range of circumstances in which medieval Christians laughed with, against, at, and through religious topics, this article investigates four objects: an ivory cross, an ampulla of a saint's blood, a preaching codex, and a pilgrim's badge. While these objects are taken to illustrate a diversity of attitudes to religious humor, they are also, in light of recent work citing the productive power of medieval matter, scrutinized as agents in their own right. The article suggests two significant patterns. On the one hand, the objects point to laughter's use as a unique mode of spiritual practice. Through amusing miracles, through the provocative work of comic sermons, and through the playful humor of pilgrimage badges, Christians from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries were able to use humor to relate to their faith in sophisticated and often counterintuitive ways. Yet as the four objects and their use also attest, these modes of comic relation were also subjected to clerical reduction and regulation. Harnessing the pedagogical potential of laughter especially, preachers, hagiographers, and clerics all worked to redirect more anarchic forms of religious humor toward functional ends. While tracing how laughter with Christian topics was increasingly encouraged, the article suggests that the price of this encouragement was that laughter was often brought into a more policed domain of orthodox Christian practice.

The Baptist movement in Cromwellian Ireland displayed a number of distinctive features. Adherents of the movement regularly claimed to have heightened spiritual experiences, which in a number of cases included firsthand encounters with the devil. This article observes the political contexts in which these claims were made while analyzing attempts by Baptist leaders to promote a more critical spirituality and counter illegitimate claims to supernatural experience. It argues that these unusual experiences, reflective more of their geographical than their denominational context, were rhetorically enabled, and Baptist leaders would struggle to both sustain and contain claims to spiritual experience.

The consistory was a crucial institution in early modern Reformed churches. This article examines the nominations and elections of elders and deacons in the Dutch Reformed consistories of Kampen and Wemeldinge, shedding light on who was being nominated and elected and how such processes functioned in these churches. In particular, research into the Kampen consistory records demonstrates the importance given to the office of elder despite little theological backing for such a hieararchy; this was true to a lesser extent in Wemeldinge. In addition, the Kampen civil authorities played a significant role in the life of the consistory, most notably through the service of burgomasters as elders. The presence of burgomasters on the consistory is not present in Wemeldinge, indicating a more separate relationship between the church and state. In both Kampen and Wemeldinge, the elections of elders and deacons were unique and responded to the challenges and priorities of the individual contexts and communities.

Jacob van Liesvelt, an Antwerpian printer, was executed in 1545 for publishing without the consent of the authorities. His sad story has been retold throughout the centuries. In an early Protestant tradition, it was argued that Van Liesvelt died because of certain Reformation-minded marginal notes contained in the Bible of 1542, an argument that has been continuously elaborated upon over the years, giving rise to the myth of Van Liesvelt as the martyr of the Word of God. This article critically questions the story of Van Liesvelt's execution, showing ways to “debunk” the myth. However, in her book Pragmatic Toleration (2015), the American scholar Victoria Christman reworks a theory earlier put forward in an article in The Sixteenth Century Journal (2011), building on the Van Liesvelt myth from husband to widow. She argues that the latter, Maria Ancxt, simply continued her husband's Protestant Bible production, uninhibited by his terrifying fate and without experiencing any form of judicial censure. This essay, in contrast, presents a painstaking study of Ancxt's entire Bible production, which firmly arrives at the conclusion that it was largely Catholic in character—although Ancxt explored the boundaries of what was possible—and that this is the reason why she was never disturbed by the authorities. This essay, therefore, also includes more general remarks on confessionally or ideologically colored history writing—in the past and present—while exploring its boundaries.

Expanding upon recent work on the heterogeneity of Catholicism and the challenges facing Tridentine reformers, this article examines local religion in two “extreme” settings: the village republic of Gersau in Central Switzerland and the missionary territory of the Custody of the Holy Land. Following conceptual remarks, the authors sketch the distinct secular contexts as well the phased evolution of localized networks for the administration of the cure of souls, the latter starting in the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, respectively. A consistently comparative approach reveals notable similarities—in terms of expanding spiritual provision and better record keeping—alongside substantial differences—especially between the clearly demarcated territorial parishes in the Alps and a more punctual system of sacrament centers in Palestine. At Gersau, where diocesan structures were weak, the church operated under the close supervision of a commune with extensive powers stretching to the rights of advowson and benefice administration. Around Jerusalem, the Franciscans—whose custos acted as the vicar apostolic—used material incentives to win over converts from other Christian denominations. Building on recent reassessments of the post-Tridentine Church, both examples thus underline the strong position of the laity in the confessional age and the need to acknowledge local sociopolitical as well as organizational factors in the formation of early modern Catholicism.

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

This essay explores the origins and expansion of New England Praying Towns in the context of the ongoing theological and religious debates of 1646–1674. This period spawned significant debates regarding the extent of the Abrahamic covenant, the requirements for church membership, and the nature of conversion. The ministers present at the Synod of 1662 gathered to settle the question of “extended baptism,” an issue where Indian and English concerns intersected. Reformers who promoted a generational vision of church membership emphasized the efficacy of spiritual preparation for younger generations and the power of a broader and more inclusive church covenant. This development benefitted Algonquians living in Praying Towns because theological preparation validated efforts to catechize and instruct Praying Indians in religious matters. Likewise, a broadening vision of church membership enabled some colonists to consider the possibility that Indians might be included within their religious communities. These projects, launched before the formalization of the Halfway Covenant in 1662, presented a tangible example of spiritual preparation in practice and served to validate the conversionary process within the colony at large. English observers found Indian conversion impressive (or reacted with intense skepticism) because most theologians considered Indians unlikely converts, especially in larger numbers. For Algonquians demonstrating an interest in English spirituality, church membership represented a degree of parity with their New England brethren. Tracing the development of New England missions, the pathway to church membership, and the debates on both missions and extended baptism reveals both the possibilities and limits to the inclusion of Indian Christians within New England's religious institutions.

This article analyzes the procedure of the Maltese diocesan court in dealing with clerical misconduct in the second half of the eighteenth century. The clergy were accused especially of physical and verbal abuse as well as of sexual incontinence. They were given a fair hearing, being assisted by a lawyer, presenting their own witnesses, and having the right to appeal the sentence. The article also discusses how the court tried to protect the clergy's honor and reputation in an attempt to avoid anticlericalism. Convicted priests could stop proceedings against them with a fine, and those of them guilty of immoral behavior were assigned another parish or else transferred to an oratory where they did penance.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus was redefining its ever-growing organization. Starting with the generals Mercurian and Acquaviva, the order attempted to leave behind the open spaces devoted to retired forms of prayer so as to put the full weight of the institution on its practical ministries. However, such an advance against contemplative prayer did not lack challenges. The present work aims to rescue a hardly studied critical prose in the midst of those changes: the case of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Ribera. This article suggests that Salamanca's professor used his words to defend contemplative prayer. For this purpose, he utilized a device of great scope in the Catholic universe during the Counter-Reformation: the hagiographic narrative. It is proposed here that the vita appears as a mechanism of dispute not only outside but also inside Roman Catholicism. In this sense, the hagiography was a platform of debate within the order. Far from being a purely repetitive text, Ribera's biography of the Castilian visionary and reformer Teresa of Ávila shows the exaltation of a form of prayer that he gladly projected to the group of all believers and especially to the Society of Jesus.

Historians of American religion generally agree that religious debates over slavery were characterized by a reliance on the plain meaning of the Bible. According to the conventional wisdom, antebellum Americans were uninterested in or even overtly hostile to tradition and church history. However, a close study of pro- and antislavery literature complicates this picture of ahistorical biblicism. For some defenders of slavery, not merely the Bible but also Christian tradition supported their position, and these Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists mined the past for examples of Christian slaveholding. On the other hand, both white and Black antislavery authors used religious history to bolster their cases against the peculiar institution, with African Americans leading the way in developing an antislavery account of the Christian past. The previously unnoticed historical dimensions of religious arguments over slavery prove central to understanding why these debates failed, while also modifying how we conceive of scripture, tradition, and religious authority in nineteenth-century America. Arguments over slavery show that religious Americans—even many who claimed to be biblicists—did not read the Bible alone but always alongside and in relation to other texts, traditions, and interpreters.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

This article takes as its central site of interrogation the stone sculpture of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) in the Washington National Cathedral, asking how a statue of a Japanese Christian leader came to be constructed inside one of America's most important religious institutions. At first glance, the statue appears to be a simple instance of commemoration for an individual who dedicated his life to helping the poor and spreading the gospel within his native country of Japan. What emerges from a close examination of the National Cathedral's archives, however, is the story of a religious leader whose international standing and reputation underwent a significant shift over the course of his career. By tracing the construction of Kagawa's image as a globally renowned Christian pacifist during the interwar period, and the challenges to this image brought on by his subsequent wartime activities, this study seeks to place the Cathedral's building of the statue into historical context. In doing so, it illuminates the politics of national representation inherent in this project of cross-cultural commemoration, while also highlighting the lessons it offers about the rise and fall of Christian internationalism in the mid-twentieth century.

This article examines North Atlantic views of Protestant missions and race in the Dominican Republic between 1905 and 1911, a brief period of political stability in the years leading up to the U.S. Occupation (1916–1924). Although Protestant missions during this period remained small in scale on the Catholic island, the views of British and American missionaries evidence how international perceptions of Dominicans transformed in the early twentieth century. Thus, this article makes two key interventions within the literature on Caribbean race and religion. First, it shows how outsiders’ ideas about the Dominican Republic's racial composition aimed to change the Dominican Republic from a “black” country into a racially ambiguous “Latin” one on the international stage. Second, in using North Atlantic missionaries’ perspectives to track this shift, it argues that black-led Protestant congregations represented a possible alternative future that both elite Dominicans and white North Atlantic missionaries rejected.

This text discusses several aspects of the interwar history of the Orthodox Church in Romanian Transylvania through the lens of the early life and political achievements of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973). By using a microhistorical approach, his life stands as proof of the ability of ideological reconversion to describe the various totalitarian challenges that defined the destiny of an entire generation of Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century. Rather than painting the biographical tapestry of Father Stan's life, the main focus of this text falls precisely on his interactions with various ideologies (Fascism and Communism), his ideological and professional reconversions, and Transylvanian Orthodox theologians’ ability to survive when confronted with various totalitarian challenges.

This paper aims to examine political, ecclesiastic, and theological changes in Switzerland during the time of the nineteenth-century culture wars. It analyzes the reforms of the churches undertaken during that period in correlation with the evolution of various social and cultural elements, in particular the ever-greater confessional diversity within the territory and the demand for religious freedom. After an initial general accounting of the history of Swiss institutions (state, Catholic, and Protestant national churches), the article explores an example of a liberal church reform that took place in Geneva in 1873: the creation of a Catholic Church defined simultaneously as Christian, national, liberal, and related to the German Old Catholic movement. It fashioned a new community in keeping with the idea that freedom of conscience should be implemented within the church, thereby meeting strong resistance from Roman Catholics. The article closes with a return to the broader Swiss context, arguing that freedom of belief and of worship was finally enshrined in the 1874 Swiss constitution as a result of the growing divisions among Christians over the compatibility of liberal values with Christian theology and the subsequent rise of a new confessionalism.

This essay offers an interpretation of certain sections of the American abolitionist movement before the Civil War. It posits that many antebellum opponents of slavery and enslaved people alike subscribed to a theory of Christianity that, following Scottish common-sense theology and the experiential, liberation-oriented Christianity of the enslaved, maintained that morality and immorality were equally comprehensible and perceivable to all humanity. When, therefore, reports of physical violence and oppression wreaked upon enslaved people in the South began circulating in the North, the conclusion that slavers must be atheists who were not truly practicing Christianity united both black Christians and white Unitarians in a common critique of slavery. The accusation that slaveholding was a form of atheism lent weight to common fears that slavery was a form of tyranny undermining the potential of American democracy among Northern Americans.

Rose Prince was a young Indigenous woman who lived during the first half of the twentieth century, spending most of her short life in a Catholic residential school near Fraser Lake, British Columbia, Canada. Shy and retiring in life, Rose's venerators believe that her understated devotion was rewarded by a postmortem miracle generally reserved only for God's greatest saints: incorruption. The Catholic hierarchy and Rose's Carrier people, though at odds on much else, are unanimous that the Lejac Indian Residential School unwittingly hosted a saint between its opening in 1922 and Prince's death in 1949, and the two groups seek together to honor her with an annual pilgrimage to her gravesite. But this fragile unanimity exists in dynamic tension with the two groups’ divergent interpretations of Prince's holiness, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of residential schools. For some within the Catholic hierarchy, Rose's sanctity provides a powerful justification for the much-critiqued assimilative educational system. For many Carrier, however, Prince is its starkest repudiation. For them, Rose was—and is—the heart of a heartless world, incarnating gentle compassion in a system that, while it trumpeted these Christian virtues, itself was notably lacking in them.