Religious History

Haunting History

by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri Even Thucydides, the celebrated father of historical realism, found it impossible to avoid revising the past in the telling of it. “With reference to the speeches in this history,” he writes in the opening to… Continue Reading →

2015/12/14 7

Passage and Place: Loci in Humanist Travel Writings

by Madeline McMahon After midday on August 14, 1483, the Dominican friar Felix Fabri and his fellow pilgrims to Jerusalem began to prepare for their celebration of the feast of the assumption of Mary. They constructed a small kind of… Continue Reading →

2015/11/09 3

The Jewish Musical Pioneers: Salamone de Rossi and Rabbi Leon of Modena

by guest contributor Elad Uzan One of the ways in which the history of the Jewish people reveals itself is through music. The Torah, Writings [Ketuvim], and the Psalms contain over eight hundred references to the spiritual and religious usages… Continue Reading →

2015/11/02 0

Only Buddhists and Anglicans: Moderation and the Church of England

by guest contributor Peter Walker Is it possible to be a fanatical Anglican? The idea sounds like a contradiction in terms. One readily thinks of George Eliot’s Casaubon, the stuffy and pedantic academic, or more sympathetically, Dawn French’s jolly and… Continue Reading →

2015/10/28 11

Moses Gaster: Folklore, ‘Medieval’ Judaism and Turn-of-the-Century Jewish Historiography

by guest contributor Yitzchak Schwartz Historians have a very specific idea of how Jewish intellectuals understood their history at the turn of the twentieth century. Most see Jewish historiography of the period as centered around the German Wissenschaft des Judentums… Continue Reading →

2015/10/19 7

Making a Case for Bishops’ Authority in the Second and Seventeenth Centuries

By Madeline McMahon In 1644, James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, published the letters of two early Christian martyrs: Polycarp and Ignatius (Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae (Oxford: Lichfield, 1644)). Both were bishops in the eastern Roman Empire and both met their… Continue Reading →

2015/09/21 3

When did Amish become Old-Fashioned?

by guest contributor Ben Goossen By now the tropes are well worn: buggies, bonnets, and broad brimmed hats. Although Anabaptists around the world are incredibly diverse, ranging like many faith communities from ultraconservative to liberal-radical, popular stereotypes have long presented… Continue Reading →

2015/06/29 1

Accessing the Secrets of Early Medieval Relic Labels

by guest contributor Jake Purcell Sometime in the eighth century, a nun sat at her writing desk in the scriptorium of the monastery at Chelles and cut a small strip of parchment measuring about 90 by 15/22 millimeters. In a… Continue Reading →

2015/06/01 5

Rescuing the Eighteenth-Century Church of England from the Enormous Condescension of Posterity

by Emily Rutherford I think I’ve found the biggest gap in the secondary literature of all time. As long ago as 1860, the Oxford priest and historian Mark Pattison noticed that historians tended to overlook the Church of England in… Continue Reading →

2015/05/06 0

A Case of Androgynous Gender-Bending in Early Modern Radical Religion

By guest contributor Timothy Wright From the perspective of contemporary feminism, Christianity has a decidedly mixed record on gender. On the one hand, many modern scholars, such as Mary Wiesner-Hank, cite Christian culture as leading to an “erosion of gender… Continue Reading →

2015/04/22 0

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