The defenders of John Calvin have sought to excuse his share in the execution of Servetus by resorting to the type of apologetic employed by Catholics in defense of the Inquisition. The victims, we are told, were politically and socially subversive and would have been suppressed in any age. In the case of Servetus this charge cannot be substantiated from his writings, since he did not reject the oath, nor the authority of the magistrate, neither did he counsel immorality. The only recourse for the apologists is to connect Servetus with Calvin's political opponents, the so-called Libertines. The argument has assumed slightly different forms in different hands, but three main contentions emerge: 1) that Servetus plotted with the Libertines for the overthrow of Calvin's régime; 2) that the Libertines endeavored to bring about the acquittal of Servetus; and 3) that they communicated with him to that end during the course of his trial.

The type of man who became bishop during the central Middle Ages depended both on who influenced the selection of the bishop and on what qualities a bishop was expected to have by those who chose him. The process by which a medieval bishop was elected has been studied in great detail, and recently attention has been turned to the backgrounds of some of the men who were elected, especially their social origins.

In the contemporary intellectual and institutional world, a distinction between theology and the study of religion is taken for granted. Those labels designate two quite separate disciplines or perspectives, even though their data overlap. Obviously, this distinction did not always exist within Christendom. Until about the middle of the seventeenth century, discussion of religion was almost always in the context of theology. But then, a new field of inquiry began to appear, and one may trace the first outlines of the study of religion or, to use a slightly too-specialized label, the scientfic study of religion.

In 1890 the Boston Herald carried the following review of an article entitled “Thoughts for the Times or The New Theology”: “A curiosity is a paper by a native African, Orishatukeh Faduma, on ‘Thoughts for the Times,’ by which he means the new theology. This is the first time that a criticof the new theology has turned up from the dark continent, and is a curious and significant paper. When a native can write like this on subjects in which he has been obliged to educate himself, it means that we are to say nothing more against the intelligence of the African race.” While correct in noting the historical significance of Faduma's efforts, the reviewer's condescension disclosed his failure to appreciate and understand the sophistication and depth of Faduma' theological analysis and agenda. Faduma's critique of elements of the New Theology did not entail his rejection of this controversial theological synthesis which emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather, his comments on religion and science, the historicalcritical method, comparative religion, missiology, the historical development of Christianity, and Christian ethics reveal that he essentially shared the theological orientation of its formulators.

To introduce the theme of this essay, there are few statements more fitting than the caustic judgment of Albertus Magnus on those whom he considered the enemies of freedom in his day. Reproaching the petty obscurantism of the opponents of Aristotle's philosophy, he described these men, whose sole aim in reading books was to find something to condemn, as stagnant themselves in intellectual inertia, and seeking always to paralyze others into their own state. It was men like these, he said, who killed Socrates, and whose plots forced Aristotle to leave Athens with the words, “I shall not give the Athenians a second chance of sinning against philosophy.” In the world of learning, according to Albertus, such bitter, bilious men are like the liver in the body; “they try to inject their own bitterness into everyone else, and to prevent others from pursuing truth in the sweetness of society.”

Historians of science and religion usually trace the origins of the “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion have been in perennial “conflict” or “warfare,” to the historical narratives of John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918). While Draper and White have been designated cofounders of the conflict thesis, there has been little research on how contemporaries responded to their narratives. This paper examines the early reception of these narratives by considering the extensive commentary they received in British and American periodicals from 1856 to 1900. Sampling a selection of this material suggests that while many rejected Draper and White's interpretation of the past, many others agreed with them in affirming that theological dogmatism came into conflict with the advance of human knowledge. This essay also suggests that Draper and White may have had a more nuanced position about the history of science and religion than has been contended by modern scholars. Whatever their intentions, however, their historical narratives had the unintended consequence of creating in the minds of their contemporaries and later generations the belief that science and religion have been and are at war.

The literature dealing with those women and men who dedicated themselves to teaching the newly freed slaves in the South during Reconstruction has grown considerably in recent years. From W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, with its positive depiction of the role of these teachers through Henry L.ee Swint's 1941 work, The Northern Teacher in the South, with its negative stereotype to more recent works, we now have a body of literature which has begun to examine this group in a more thorough and complex manner.1 The general stereotype which often appears in the literature is of the missionar teacher as a white woman from New England, fresh from the abolitionist movement. While it is true that many teachers fit into this category, there were also many African-American teachers and missionaries, both women and men.2 A good deal of the literature has dealt, at least briefly, with the ways in which African-American men functioned in the context of such organizations as the American Missionary Association (AMA). However, the experience of these men was different from that of African- American women, in part because these men were more likely to be givenadministrative positions in the organizations, either as principals, field agents, or supported missionaries. Most of the women, then, were more likely to remain “in the trenches” as teachers during their tenure with the missionary society.3

The Civil War more than any other episode in American history struck into the lives of all the families of the land, demanding that everybody take sides. Partisanship focused upon many facets and features of the conflicting causes, but the order of the event allowed no bipartisanship. Only a handful of anticipative revisionists, who earnestly cried that the whole affair, even once begun, was needless and somehow avoidable, found ground for nonpartisanship. Families branched across Mason and Dixon's line split and sided in spite of torn loyalties and wistful recollections of unity. Had slaves foreseen, as freedmen knew, that emancipation's price was personal degradation, they might have borne mixed feelings about the issue, but even their ambivalences purchased no point of impartiality.

When Godfridus Dellius, Dutch Reformed minister at Albany, surveyed the religious situation of the Middle Colonies in 1694, he found little to cheer him. In addition to the recent deaths of two colleagues and the political upheaval in New York, Dominie Dellius lamented the intrusion of William Bertholf into the Dutch churches in New Jersey. Bertholf, a cooper by trade, openly flaunted his independence from both the Netherlands ecclesiastical authorities and the orthodox New York clergy. With pietist leanings, Bertholf had ingratiated himself with Dutch communicants on the New Jersey frontier. “He will now not neglect anything to carry out his designs,” Dellius warned, and “soon some marvelous kind of theology will develop here.”

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.

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 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.

In assaying responsibility for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the crescendo of persecution which preceded it, historians have shown rather noteworthy indecisiveness. It would seem that almost every member of Louis XIV's inner circle and every possible combination of individuals within that select group have been stigmatized at one time or another by some memoirist or historian for his part in the events of 1685. Louvois, Le Tellier, Châteauneuf, Harlay, Seignelay, Fr. La Chaise, Mme. de Maintenon, and others have had their reputations alternately blackened and whitewashed, or restored to a fairly satisfactory shade of gray. The Grand Monarch himself has been portrayed both as the innocent victim of unscrupulous and misleading advisers and as the archfanatic in an entourage of fanatics.

The bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights offers an appropriate occasion to reassess its intellectual heritage. British radicals, I will argue, had a major impact on the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including the rarely cited ninth amendment, so crucial for the resolution of such sociolegal issues as the rights to life and privacy and the place of religion in society. By radicals I mean those who sought fundamental changes in politics, religion, society, or the economy by striking at the root of contemporary assumptions and institutions.

The concept of a cultural whole is a very fruitful idea for the cultural historian. Involved in it is the assumption that a unity of form pervades the entire culture and that each significant part of the culture—religious, political, social, literary, and so forth—participates in and gives expression to this pervasive form. The assumption is clearly one of great practical importance, for it invites the historian to believe that a close study of one part will throw light upon all others. Accordingly, the present study seeks, by special focus on one aspect of evangelical thought, to help elucidate the pervasive liberal outlook of midnineteenth-century America.

Considerable mystery has long surrounded the antecedents of the Society of Friends. George Fox, an unlettered country lad, has been pictured as having gathered the Society after receiving, through a series of direct revelations, a full-blown message of redemption. Quaker historians have sought to confirm this portrayal by emphasizing that it was “in communion with his deepest self” that he made his “great spiritual discovery,” and that it came to him from no outward source. This explanation seemed rather naive to the more sophisticated mind of Rufus M. Jones, and he set himself to the task of uncovering the actual source from which Fox's religious thinking was derived. His two volumes—Studies in Mystical Religion and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries —are sufficient testimony of the thoroughness and scholarship with which he tackled the problem. Nevertheless, after long and careful investigation, he felt obliged to confess that nothing more positive could be affirmed than that the possible influences in Fox's environment, for the most part, “worked upon him in subconscious ways, as an atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than a clearly conceived body of truth.” This conclusion was tenable so long as Fox was regarded as the founder of the Quakers. It now seems evident, however, by his own admissions, that he was not the founder but simply joined a sect already in existence. This fact necessitates an attempt to identify the group with which Fox became affiliated.