By Dyan Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1997–98; 2012–13) Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and … Continued
Edited by Alastair Minnis (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) and Rosalynn Voaden The first comprehensive survey of the major – but much neglected – contribution made by holy women to the religious culture of the later Middle Ages. Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition offers the first wide-ranging study of the remarkable women who contributed to the … Continued
By Christopher Grasso (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and … Continued
By Marcia L. Colish (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as … Continued
By William LanglandEdited by George Kane (NHC Fellow, 1987–88) and George Russell (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) An edition in the form of Huntington Library MS HM 143, corrected and restored from the known evidence, with variant readings
In 1845, an unsigned article in a popular American journal, a long standing Jacksonian publication, the Democratic Review, issued an unmistakable call for American expansionism. Focusing mainly on bringing the Republic of Texas into the union, it declared that expansion represented “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for … Continued
In 1691, this notorious episode in the history of early New England began to unfold in a small rural neighborhood on the outskirts of Salem town, then the second-largest seaport in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Several adolescent girls in Salem Village began to exhibit strange and alarming symptoms that some of their parents quickly came to … Continued
Teaching the American Revolution presents a prime opportunity to instruct your students in the ways that religion shaped the American past. Most people today think of the War for Independence as a purely secular event, a chapter in political, constitutional, military, and diplomatic history. They envision an initial resistance to the British empire triggered mainly … Continued
To create a holy commonwealth and a godly society, the founders of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut instituted religious establishments—arrangements by which the civil government favored one church and penalized anyone who dissented from its teachings. The view that government had no business meddling in religious matters gained momentum throughout the Anglo-American world during the eighteenth … Continued
What historians call “the first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, … Continued