In the early thirteenth century, informal communities of pious lay women in urban areas of Northern Europe came to the attention of the Church. These women lived in their own homes or small communities, and played a prominent role in secular society. However, these women soon found themselves both the subject of controversy, and increasingly steered toward a monastic model. Attempts were made to create and institutionalize a “middling” status. These primarily took the form of the creation of “third orders” or “tertiary groups” attached to official religious orders. Using the example of the so-called Franciscan third order, this article explores the evolution and institutionalization of penitential life from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It both traces the evolution of the fictive Franciscan penitential order, and places it in its wider context. In so doing, it explores the norms and controversies associated with this way of life in later medieval and early modern religious culture.

In 1996, Bernhard Lohse wondered if the Luther presented by some would recognize the Luther described by others. Trying to recognize the “political” Luther would be especially difficult. On the one hand, Thomas Müntzer was but the first in a long line of polemicists, journalists, politicians, and scholars who have accused Luther of releasing the sword of secular authority from all control and thereby opening up centuries of authoritarian subjugation. On the other hand, Peter Frarin argued in 1566 that Protestantism equaled sedition, rebellion, and the subversion of civil order. In the criticism of Luther for being either too conservative or too liberal, one thing remained fairly constant: the source of Luther's major shortcoming—his theology of the Two Kingdoms.

Georg Major was a reluctant controversialist. External events and his own theological concerns forced him into a controversy which he loathed but to which he gave his name, the “Majoristic controversy.” That controversy forced Luther's heirs to refine their definition of the relationship between faith and works, but it also wracked and plagued Georg Major's life for a quarter of a century in spite of his efforts to work his way out of the dispute.

In 1834 the rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Burlington, New Jersey desired to place a cross atop his newly-refurbished sanctuary. No ordinary rector, George Washington Doane also served as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey. Shortly after taking charge of St. Mary's in 1833, he and his vestry had decided to renovate their old church, and their ambitious new design featured a cruciform plan with Greek details, including a pediment adorned with lotus leaves and a tower “derived from that built at Athens… commonly called the Tower of the Winds.” But when Doane carried out the plans for “an enriched Greek Cross” to be mounted on the roof, the community stood aghast. A local Presbyterian minister chronicled the confrontation, and he began by asserting that most of St. Mary's vestrymen had originally approved the designs without “noticing the Cross at the time.” The project was thus completed, and to the vestry's “great surprise, as well as that of many in the community, of all ‘denominations’—lo! a Cross made quite a Catholic appearance on the apex of the pediment!” Controversy arose, “both in the Vestry and out of it,” and “after a very warm meeting, one of the Vestry shortly after declared that unless the Cross was taken down very soon, it should be pulled down.”

I should like to call attention once again to the old home truth that ideas, while they may not be completely independent of their environment, are still possessed of a heredity of their own that can and often does transform the material circumstances of man and affect the course of history. the course of history. I have chosen for purposes of illustration the covenant or federal theological conception, which worked a powerful influence in Scottish society during the early decades of the seventeenth century and which, in turn, was peculiarly influenced and reshaped by that society until it evolved into a symbol for the revolution which terminated in the overthrow of the monarchy of Charles I. In brief, it is my conviction that this rebellion against Charles and his government was primarily and mainly, though not solely, the result of a religious ferment that had been brewing for forty years.

Acceptance of providence, the belief that an ultimate being determines the course of events, has always created problems for moralists and advocates of free will, and for obivous reasons. If any events has been foreordained, how can hemans be free? If all is determined, why should humans try to do what is right? Aside from the philosophical questions raised by a belief in provedence, however, scholars such as the distinguished economists Jacob Viner have begun to examine the doctrine of providence from the point of view of its broad ideological and social impact. Though Professor Viner modestly claimed that his study of providence was simply an intellectual history pursued for its own sake, he demonstrated many of the doctrine's implications for early modern thought and social structures. Similar emphasis on the significance of the early modern idea of providence is also found in Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic.

In the wake of the 1927 landmark Supreme Court decision in the Buck v. Bell case, which affirmed the constitutionality of laws authorizing the compulsory sterilization of so-called “feeble-minded” residents of state institutions, moral theologian and priest John A. Ryan took up his pen to address the issue of sterilization from a Catholics perspective. In the resulting pamphlet, Human Sterilization, Ryan argued that eugenic sterilization measures were not only unscientific and bad social policy, but that the Buck decision in its articulation of civil rights represented a clear departure from the understanding of natural rights in Catholic moral teaching. The production of this text was the first piece of literature published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference that attempted to mobilize Catholic citizens throughout the United States in active opposition to eugenic sterilizahon laws as they came before the state legislatures.

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.

The abolition of monastic vows and mandatory clerical celibacy and the exaltation of marriage and the family were among the most revolutionary changes in religion and ethics produced by the Reformation. Although scholars have given it too little attention, the controversy over the relative merits of marriage and celibacy, and particularly the campaign for clerical marriage, played a major role in the development of the Reformation. The law of celibacy and vows of chastity became principal topics of discussion when the reformers strove to break down the old order of medieval Christianity. The most concrete manifestation of the impact of the controversy over marriage and celibacy lay in the fact that many priests joined the Reformation movement precisely to escape the restrictions imposed upon their domestic life by the old order.

A lesser known but perhaps significant phase of American religious reformism manifested itself beginning with the eighteen twenties when missionaries attempted to graft Protestantism on Greek soil. These spiritual reformers prepared to plant their faith in Greece while Samuel Gridley Howe, Jonathan P. Miller, and George Jarvis sought to help the Greeks win their independence from the Turks. This phase of missionary activity represented something extraordinary, because the Americans were attempting to impose their kind of Christianity on a people who had been Christians centuries before America was discovered.

In the study of women and religion, it has long been common to suggest that women were particularly attracted to nontraditional theology, often of a spiritualistic nature. In earlier days, women's heretical inclinations were explained by their weaker minds and their irrational nature which made them susceptible to the influence of demagogues and false preachers. In more recent feminist interpretations, mysticism and sectarianism are seen as providing opportunites to women for religious expression and forms of leadership not open to them in established churches.

It was with a flourish of grace-borne optimism that Thomas Hooker opened his massive redaction of a career's worth of “preparationist” theology, the posthumously published Application of Redemption. The sermons in which this two-volume work consists were published in London in 1656, under the editorial direction of the Independent divines Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, but had been preached in New England in the aftermath of the “free-grace controversy” of the mid-1630s and rewritten by Hooker in the 1640s in order to “refine and expand” his previous explications of soul work. Setting concerned sights upon old England's luxuriant antinomian problem, Goodwin and Nye turned to Hooker, late of Chelmsford and Connecticut, in hopes that a strong dose of spiritual discipline might restore moral order to a disordered land. The God of the preparationists, it has been remarked, contributed centrally to an “emerging culture of stamina and rigor”; by the 1650s, however, the God who made his orderly favors known “by a long procession of hints, of interpretable suggestions” had relinquished the reins of moral control. None was better qualified than Hooker to interrogate fault for the sake of the regaining of favor.

On 7 May 1437, in a ritual both sad and absurd, the Council of Basel broke apart in discord and disorder. Two factions in the cathedral session that morning, each “simultaneously reading its decree, shouting its Placet and singing its Te Deum,” divided the house on the issue of selecting a site for unification talks with the Church of Constantinople. The council that claimed the authority to rule Christianity in concordantia catholica (in universal harmony), the council that proclaimed its primacy over the pope, demonstrated its incapacity to put its claims into practice. Nicholas of Cusa, a prominent figure in the conciliarists' camp and author of the 1433 treatise Concordantia catholica, the declaration by which the council intended to reassert its supremacy over the papacy, was on the side of the minority that morning. On this occasion the learned conciliarist found himself in the unusual position of supporting Pope Eugenius IV. What had caused his change of mind, or heart, or, at least, position? Had Cusa indeed changed, or beneath this apparent conversion was he constant in his convictions?

Narratives about women and religion in Victorian and Edwardian society seldom addressed the world of the Catholic laity, leaving the impression that Catholics were unimportant in English history. Pushed into anonymity, they were easily misunderstood because of their religious sensibilities and loyalty to a church governed not from London but Rome. This was a church long subject to various forms of disability in England and with a membership of roughly 5 percent of the population around 1900. By then, objections to the Catholic Church as a foreign institution had lessened, but critics still labeled Catholics “a people apart,” viewing them as too disinterested in their neighbors' welfare to play a vital part in public life. So commonplace was this particular point of view that it obscured Catholic participation in social causes such as the hard fought campaign for women's suffrage. As often as journalists, suffragists, and members of Parliament debated enfranchisement in the years before and after the First World War, very little is known today about the role Catholics played in the struggle for women's rights.

Inquiry into puritan “federal” doctrine established decades ago the now standard distinction between the covenant of grace and the national covenant. Perry Miller provided the first extensive analysis of the gracious covenant, and apparently it was he, too, who first found—or emphasized—in puritan sources the idea that “a nation as well as an individual can be in covenant with God.” His basic proposal, that ”the ‘covenant of grace’ … refer[red] to individuals and personal salvation in the life to come, [whereas the national covenant] applied to nations and governed their temporal success in this world,” has become a virtual article of faith in puritanist scholarship, although few recent historians have shared his profound interest in the latter covenant. Indeed, relegation of communal and this-worldly themes to a separate and inevitably secondary category has narrowed dramatically the focus of inquiry. It suffices to note that the three most recent monographs on the subject in English virtually equate “federal theology” with a gracious individualized contract exclusive to the elect (and its antithesis, the “covenant of works”).

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

The Schools of Christian Doctrine taught the fundamentals of Catholicism, and reading and writing, to a very large number of boys and girls in sixteenth-century Italy. Numerous laymen and laywomen gave up their holiday leisure in order to teach in these schools. The Schools of Christian Doctrine were a significant feature of the Catholic Reformation, a broad movement of Catholic renewal that began before 1517 and whose major initiatives were not necessarily responses to the Protestant Reformation. New religious orders, missionary activity, the founding of institutions to care for the sick, poor, and homeless, and a general effort to teach and preach to the laity more effectively characterized the Catholic Reformation. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and others provided leadership and were canonized in later centuries. Scholars have given all of the above a good deal of attention, but probably only specialists are aware of the Schools of Christian Doctrine.

In the era between the Civil War and the Depression the mythical character called the “American Mind” was troubled. All was well during the day when prosperity and success faced him at every turn, but at night he would sometimes dream of his childhood and awake feeling strangely uneasy. His analyst explained that this tension was the product of latent guilt feelings and suggested for therapy that he read himself to sleep with recent studies of the oppressive effects of Puritanism on young national minds. Turning to these works, the “American Mind” found that the analyst had been quite right. The source of the guilt feelings, he discovered, was an irrational phase of his development called the Reformation. This phase had been dominant when he lived in New England (he since had moved to the Midwest), but he was assured that the latest scholarship had discovered its influence to be harsh, grotesque, superstitious, narrowminded, illiberal, and worst of all intolerant.1 The problem was, one expert informed him, that this era “was unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance.” Another observed that the Reformation attitudes were a “subtle poison” flowing thorugh the veins of the entire social organism. Still another implied that the “splendor of the Renaissance” had been delayed three hundred years by Reformation intolerance. Convinced that the open-mindedness of the Renaissance was healthier than the irrational bigotry of the Reformation, the “American Mind” of this era began to feel easier about his past. He resolved to tolerate everyone, except of course his more conservative enemies whom he damned as “Puritan.”

America made its immigrants ethnocentric. Except for the travelers from England, every other nationality sensed its cultural distinctiveness soon after settling here with countrymen. The process of identity-consciousness went on continually with every group. In a strange and unknown environment, newcomers, particularly the least Anglo-Saxon, joined their fellows for a security of continuity, yearning for that Old World basis of religion, language, and social customs. Although these fresh ties could not restore their European community exactly, they could offer a reasonable substitute for adjustment, the American immigrant society. To latecoming arrivals the reconstructed ethnic colony moderated the differences of the original and destined community and made the contrast less jarring. The immigrants had refashioned the old primary settlements in America and struggled to maintain them. In the recent debate over the acculturative process, how the “melting pot” worked, certainly the ultural pluralists describe best the first-generation communities.