Church History articles from March 2002

Church History archives from March 2002

Heretics and Jews in the writings of Ademar of Chabannes and the origins of medieval anti-Semitism.
March 1, 2002... Although many scholars now recognize the turn of the millennium as the key point in the development of medieval civilization and the birth of Europe, there remains a tendency to look to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the period in...

Religious diversity and everyday ethics in the seventeenth-century Dutch city Kampen.
March 1, 2002... In the century when heretics in the Netherlands were persecuted, the Dutch Revolt occurred, and events took place that ultimately led to the National Synod of Dordrecht (1618-19), religion and society were clearly interwoven. Research on this...

Monasteries without walls: secret monasticism in the Soviet Union, 1928-39.
March 1, 2002... When discussing the state of religion during the Soviet period, those following the traditional historical interpretation have held that the Communist Party successfully eradicated religion, particularly Russian Orthodoxy. While vestiges may...

"She offered herself up": the victim soul and victim spirituality in Catholicism.
March 1, 2002... A teenage Catholic girl lies immobilized in her bed in Worcester, Massachusetts, her dark hair gathered in pink satin ribbons, her lacy nightgown spread neatly around her. The pleasing effect of a damsel in a pre-Raphaelite painting is broken...

Reflections on regionalism and U.S. religious history.
March 1, 2002... The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of...

If it's South Dakota you must be Episcopalian: lies, truth-telling, and the mapping of U.S. religion.
March 1, 2002... Atlas of American Religion: The Denominational Era, 1776-1990. By William M. Newman and Peter L. Halvorson. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira, 2000. 176 pp. $49.95 cloth. A New Historical Atlas of Religion in America. By Edwin S. Gaustad and...

Mapping the metaphysical, plotting the pious: assessing four new atlases of religion.
March 1, 2002... The Baker Atlas of Christian History. Edited by Tim Dowley. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1997. 160 pp. $29.99 cloth. Atlas of American Religion: The Denominational Era 1776-1990. By William M. Newman and Peter Halvorson. Walnut Creek,...

The shift from church and state to religions as public life in modern Europe. (Perspectives *).
March 1, 2002... CHURCH AND STATE IN SMALL EUROPE The theme of church and state in modern Europe lay well-situated within the positivist genre of historical study, which served as the dominant model in the profession for generations and in some sense still...

Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews and Christians.
March 1, 2002... By H. Gregory Snyder. Religion in the First Christian Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2000. xvi + 325 pp. $85.00 cloth; $27.99 paper. Gregory Snyder explores a subject dear to the readers of this journal: how people in the Greco-Roman world...

Ignatius adversus Valentinianos? Chronologische und theologiegeschichtliche Studien zu den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochien.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Thomas Lechner. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 47. Leiden: Brill, 1999. xxvi + 370 pp. n.p. Thomas Lechner's dissertation at the University of Munich argues for a date between 165 and 175 instead of during the first two...

Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems.
March 1, 2002... By Dennis E. Trout. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 27. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xx + 326 pp. $55.00 cloth. This outstanding book represents the latest in a series of distinguished biographies of major...

Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity.
March 1, 2002... By Carol Harrison. Christian Theology in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xvi + 242 pp. $60.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. In the foreword to this volume for a new series on "Christian Theology in Context," Carol Harrison tells us...

Gregor von Nyssa: Oratio consolatoria in Pulcheriam.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Ulrike Gantz. Chresis: Die Methode der Kirchenvater im Umgang mit der antiken Kultur 6. Basel: Schwabe & Co AG, 1999. 315 pp. Fr. 50.00; DM 58.00; OS 450.00 cloth. The present volume is a revised doctoral dissertation, which was...

Visita Nos: Reception, Rhetoric, and Prayer in a North African Monastery.
March 1, 2002... By Thomas S. Ferguson. American University Studies, series 7: Theology and Religion, vol. 203. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xii + 138 pp. $36.95 cloth. Professor Ferguson has written a study for specialists in late antique proconsular...

The Use of the Past in the Early Middle Ages.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x + 283 pp. $64.95 cloth; $23.95 paper. Originally born out of a series of sessions offered at the 1995 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, this is...

Conflicting Loyalties in Early Medieval Bavaria: a View of Socio-Political Interaction, 680-900.
March 1, 2002... By Kathy Lynne Roper Pearson. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999. xvi + 247 pp. $78.95 cloth. In Conflicting Loyalties in Early Medieval Bavaria, Kathy Lynne Roper Pearson draws upon the results of a long tradition of German historiography and...

The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform.
March 1, 2002... By Mechthild Gretsch. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 471 pp. $74.95 cloth. Fifty years ago, one could hardly have imagined speaking of the tenth-century English Benedictine...

The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives.
March 1, 2002... By Carole Hillenbrand. New York: Routledge, 2000. lvi + 648 pp. $50.00 paper. Carole Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh, has created what may be the most interesting history of the Crusades since...

The Cathars.
March 1, 2002... The Cathars. By Malcolm Lambert. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999. viii + 344 pp. 10 photos. 11 maps. $31.95 paper. The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages. By Malcolm Barber. The Medieval World. New York: Longman,...

Francis of Assisi: a Revolutionary Life.
March 1, 2002... By Adrian House. Mahwah, N.J.: HiddenSpring (Paulist), 2001. xv + 336. $28.00 cloth. There has been a steady stream of modern biographies of Francis of Assisi since Paul Sabatier published his controversial life of the saint in 1893 (put...

An Ungodly War: the Sack of Constantinople and the Fourth Crusade.
March 1, 2002... By W. B. Bartlett. Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Sutton, 2000. xviii + 229 pp. $29.95 cloth. Greeks, the author of the book under review here tells the reader, are "[b]y nature a pessimistic people" (152). If one ignores statements like these, what...

Robert Grosseteste.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Robert Grosseteste. By James McEvoy. Great Medieval Thinkers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xx + 219 pp. $35.00 cloth; $18.95 paper. This new series seeks to introduce university students and general readers with no previous...

Marian Representations in the Miracle Tales of Thirteenth-Century Spain and France.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By David A. Flory. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000. xx + 156 pp. $49.95 cloth. Current debate about Mary centers on her role in redemption, but David Flory's study takes us back to the central mediating role she...

For Her Good Estate: the Life of Elizabeth De Burgh.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Frances A. Underhill. The New Middle Ages 12. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. x + 221 pp. $45.00 cloth Elizabeth (1295--1360), known as de Burgh from the first of her three marriages, was born a Clare and, with two sisters, shared the...

Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender.
March 1, 2002... By Rosalind Brown-Grant. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv + 224 pp. $64.95 cloth. According to Rosalind Brown-Grant, there has been a tendency among feminist critics of Christine de...

Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics in a Late Medieval City State.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Diana Norman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xii + 252 pp. $60.00 cloth. Since the thirteenth century, the Virgin has been Queen of Siena, at once the city's spiritual patron and, more uniquely, a special kind of civic monarch....

Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470-1550.
March 1, 2002... By Ken Franhill. York: York Medieval, 2001. ix + 237 pp. $90.00 cloth. With meticulous care and thoroughness Ken Farnhill analyzes guild activity in East Anglia, with special attention to those at Wymondham, a large parish southwest of...

The Wise Master Builder: Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Cathedrals.
March 1, 2002... By Nigel Hiscock. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. xviii + 340 pp. 107 plates $99.95 cloth. As Nigel Hiscock states in the preface to his book, his investigation of the design of early medieval abbeys and cathedrals led him to pose the question,...

Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West.
March 1, 2002... By Diana Webb. International Library of Historical Studies 12. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999. viii + 290 pp. $59.50 cloth. Pilgrims and Pilgrimage comprises sets of translated documents and short introductory essays concerning various...

Reform and Renewal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Louis Pascoe, SJ.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto. Studies in the History of Christian Thought 96. Leiden: Brill, 2000. viii + 264 pp. $90.00. In principle the theme of this festschrift is reform in the medieval church. In practice...

The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450-1700.
March 1, 2002... By Craig M. Koslofsky. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. xiv + 223 pp. $59.95 cloth. It is a marvel that nearly every publication that forms part of the current outpouring of literature on the subject...

Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555-1585.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard. Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen Verhandlingen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, deel 176. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,...

Penitence in the Age of Reformations.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot, Hants, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000. xvi + 296 pp. $84.95 cloth. This book began with two sessions on penitence at the 1997 Sixteenth...

Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost.
March 1, 2002... By John N. King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xx + 227 pp. $59.95 cloth. John N. King is on a recovery mission in this worthwhile book to locate in Paradise Lost all of Milton's embedded polemics. Working in the manner of a...

Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. xx + 344 pp. n.p. The study of "confessionalization" as a framework for analysis of early modern European thought and life often concentrates on the Konfessionen, the...

Pierre Bayle's Reformation: Conscience and Criticism on the Eve of the Enlightenment.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Barbara Sher Tinsley. Cranbury, N.J.: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. 476 pp. $65.00 cloth. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) might be the first modern critical church historian. If, as Anthony Grafton believes, Bayle's idiosyncratic use of...

The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Rainer Liedtke and Stephan Wendehorst. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. x + 223 pp. $79.95 cloth. This volume contributes to the growing body of scholarship on European nationalism and the nation-state. It justly...

Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Darrell Jodock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv + 345 pp. $69.95 cloth. The Vatican condemnations of a Syllabus of Errors in 1864, of Americanism in 1899, and of Modernism in 1907 make for grim reading in the...

Evangelical Experiences: a Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicalism, 1918-1939.
March 1, 2002... By Ian M. Randall. Pater Noster Biblical and Theological Monographs. Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K.: Paternoster, 1999. xiii + 309 pp. n.p. In the preface to this book, the author states that "the present study seeks to pursue in greater depth...

The Vatican and the Holocaust: the Catholic Church and the Jews during the Nazi Era.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Randolph L. Braham. New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2000. vi + 137 pp. $35.00 cloth. In March 1998 the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews...

Mission to America: a History of Saint Vincent Archabbey, the First Benedictine Monastery in the United States.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Jerome Oetgen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000. xi + 607 pp. $39.95 cloth. Commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Mission to America tells the story...

The Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century: Renewing and Reimaging the City of God.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by John Deedy. A Michael Glazier Book. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2000. xvi + 244 pp. $24.95 paper. This book is not a systematic history of Roman Catholicism in the past century, but a collection of fourteen independently...

Trying Times: Essays on Catholic Higher Education in the 20th Century.
March 1, 2002... Edited by William M. Shea and Daniel Van Slyke. Atlanta: Scholars, 1999. xx + 219 pp. $39.95 cloth. This volume is the product of a conference and ongoing seminar held during 1996-97, the year Alice Gallin, O.S.U., served as visiting...

Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture.
March 1, 2002... By Grant Wacker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvi + 364 pp. $35.00 cloth. Grant Wacker's elegant study invites the reader into the everyday lives of the first-generation Pentecostals who began a movement in 1906 that...

La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Jule Dejager Ward. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiv + 227 pp. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Jule Dejager Ward brings a unique perspective to her study of La Leche League, the organization dedicated to the...

Religion in the Modern American West.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Ferenc Morton Szasz. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. xviii + 270 pp. $35.00 cloth. Drawing his mental border of the American West at the one hundredth meridian (the "line of aridity"), Szasz surveys the history of religious...

The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
March 1, 2002... By Susan Friend Harding. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. xvi + 336 pp. $50.00 cloth. $18.95 paper. The Book of Jerry Falwell, the distillation of two decades of work by one of this nation's more gifted anthropologist, is...

American Spiritualities: a Reader.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Catherine L. Albanese. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 530 pp. $70.00 cloth; $27.95 paper. Catherine Albanese takes the conventional distinction between spirituality and religion as the starting point for this...

The Child in Christian Thought.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Marcia J. Bunge. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001. xiv + 513 pp. $24.00 paper. Through no fault of the contributors, this book seems old-fashioned and inadequate. A better title would have been The Child in Christian Theology,...

Missions and Missionaries.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Pieter N. Holtrop and Hugh McLeod. Studies in Church History: Subsidia 13. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2000. x + 229 pp. $75.00 cloth. This volume contains fourteen of the twenty-five papers...

A Historical Anthology of Irish Church Music.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Gerard Gillen and Andrew Johnstone. Irish Musical Studies 6. Dublin: Four Courts, 2001.335 pp. $45.00 cloth. This book, the sixth in a series of academic studies of music in Ireland, presents an anthology of liturgical...

Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies.
March 1, 2002... Edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. vii + 438 pp. $70.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. This edited volume grew out of a 1998 Brown University conference on law and religion. It seeks to take a measure of...