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The RHA Newsletter of the Religious History Association Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2024-03-17
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“We Pledge Ourselves to the Masses of Working Girls”: The Distinctive Mission of the Women's Young Christian Workers Movement in its Founding Decades in England (1940s–1960s) Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2024-02-29 PATRICIA JONES
“The first important point is to win the young women with whom we work,” explains an early campaign newsletter from the women's English Young Christian Workers (YCW) Movement. In a context where the Catholic community was still a defensive minority, the outward looking mission of the YCW was remarkable and unique. The Movement's praxis was particularly distinctive, focused on a demographic group, working‐class
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Jesuit Mission Funding and Legacy Donations: Revisiting the Belgian Controversy over the Disposition of the De Boey Estate, 1850–1868* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2024-02-12 H. RICHARD FRIMAN
During the mid-1860s, the Belgian press and politics were riveted by legal proceedings alleging Jesuit financial predation against the estate of noted Antwerp businessman and donor to religious causes Guillaume-Joseph De Boey. These controversies remain understudied in prominent scholarship on De Boey's extensive support for Jesuit missions in the United States. More recent scholarship on religious
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Creating Colonial Christian Cultures in Canterbury: St. Augustine's Missionary College Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Emily J. Manktelow
Throughout the nineteenth century, religion and Empire became increasingly fused in the Victorian imagination through a lens of providentialism that saw Empire as an instrument for worldwide Christianisation. This article uses the case of St. Augustine's Missionary College to explore the creation of a distinctly colonial Christian culture in Canterbury. This culture was both created and curated through
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Ano te mahara e reka, how sweet the memory: The changing remembrance of Bishop Jean-Baptise François Pompallier in the Twentieth Century* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Rowan Light
In 2001, Catholic pilgrims, led by Māori priest Henare Tate, travelled to France to exhume the remains of Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier (1821–1872), the first Catholic Bishop of Aotearoa New Zealand. Placed in a lead-lined coffin, the remains were taken back to New Zealand and laid to rest in Motuti, Hokianga. The interment — 131 years after Pompallier's death — marked the end of an extraordinary
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Revisiting Female Pilgrimage in Medieval Oxford: Evidence from the Miracula Sancte Frideswide* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Anne E. Bailey
The most common form of female pilgrimage in medieval England was local pilgrimage to a saint's shrine. One English pilgrimage destination which is especially associated with women is St Frideswide's shrine in Oxford, owing to a collection of miracle stories compiled in the 1180s in which women are particularly prevalent. Drawing on a new edition and translation of the Miracula sancte Frideswide, this
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Intellectual Authority and Its Changing Infrastructures in Australian and United States Christianity, 1960s–2010s Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-11-24 Christopher Mayes, Michael Thompson, Joanna Cruickshank
The seismic events of 2020 — a global pandemic with differing levels of trust in public health authorities, the prominence of conspiracy theories, and fresh attention to the ongoing impact of systemic and individual racism — once more made it clear the significance of the way Christians relate to issues of knowledge, expertise and authority in the public sphere. Yet the events of 2020 did not come
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We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious, the Consolidation Controversies, and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Elisabeth C. Davis
This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local
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Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain. Catholicism, Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–69)* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-04-16 Verónica García-Martín
This article examines the evolution and transformation of female religious life in Spain under Franco's regime, which began after the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and ended with the dictator's death in 1975. During the dictatorship, the public stance towards Catholicism made consecrated religious life one of the potential social undertakings for women at that time. The Concordat of 1953 corroborated National
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Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-04-13 David Hastie
The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper
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Simon of Tournai's Stroke: The Image of an Irate Unbeliever Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Keagan Brewer
For centuries after his death in the late twelfth century, Simon of Tournai, a master of theology in the Parisian schools, had a reputation for being an unbeliever punished by God with a stroke. This article gathers the eight known medieval sources for his stroke and examines them from a mythogenetic perspective to demonstrate how different authors writing with different purposes, genres, and biases
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Lactantius's “Modern” Conception of Religio* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Toni Alimi
Scholars of religion sometimes argue that a distinctively modern conception of religion takes religion to be a trans-cultural category, divisible into “true” and “false” versions, of which Christianity is the core type. Thus, according to the so-called modern conception of religion, every culture has its own religion. Some are true (paradigmatically Christianity), some are false. This paper argues
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The Angelic Brethren and Everyday Sacredness: A Protestant Theologian's Journey from Berlin to Leiden in 1717* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Lennart Gard, Mike A. Zuber
In the summer of 1717, a private teacher named Jacob Michelmann travelled from Berlin to Leiden to meet the head of a Protestant community known as the Angelic Brethren. During a pivotal time in European religious and intellectual history, Johann Wilhelm Überfeld sought to inculcate in his followers, including Michelmann, a powerful sense of everyday sacredness. Überfeld criticised what he perceived
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“Where the spirit of wisdom lies”: Inculturation, self-determination and the authority of First Nations Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Laura Michelle Rademaker
By the 1970s, Christian missions to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were enthusiastic supporters of Indigenous self-determination, even as they sought to maintain a missionary presence in Aboriginal communities. This article asks how missions continued to seek to influence and direct Aboriginal churches and communities through espousing self-determination, and how Aboriginal leaders engaged
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“A Holy Experiment”: Medical Mission Sisters or how Women Religious within the Catholic Church became Doctors* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Ana Jelnikar
Drawing on archival sources and adopting a microhistory approach that pays attention to “hidden transcripts,” this article aims to fill a gap in the scholarship on Catholic women and medical missions by analysing the largely overlooked contribution of two women doctors, Agnes McLaren and Anna Dengel, in professionalising the healing ministry of the Catholic Church. In 1925, Dengel founded an international
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The Baptism of an Indian Juggler: Event and Narrative in the Swedish Press, 1827–1852 Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Jens Carlesson Magalhães, Fredrik Jansson
In 1827, an Indian juggler named Mooty Madua Samme converted to Christianity in Stockholm, Sweden. This historical event got much attention in the press at the time – as did his succeeding marriage to a Swedish woman named Erica – and was celebrated as a victory for the Evangelical Lutheran faith. Later, in the 1840s, a narrative depicting the event spread via a travelogue by Xavier Marmier, which
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The Knightly Brothers of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Twelfth-Century Cistercian Lay Monk* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Joseph Millan-Cole
Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (r. 1115–1153) was a prominent twelfth-century religious leader whose knightly family collectively converted to monastic life with him in adulthood around 1113. Following Clairvaux's foundation in 1115, Bernard's brothers held roles of significant estate seniority despite their own professional limitations as newly converted and apparently illiterate knights. This study discusses
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Australian Seventh-day Adventism and World War One: A Different Path Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Daniel Reynaud
The Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church in Australia differed from most Christian churches in its response to World War One, openly condemning the war as an evil to be avoided while attempting to remain focused on its evangelistic mission. This article explores the philosophy of the SDAs that allowed them to stand apart from the bulk of the churches, and the evolving nuanced path forward negotiated
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Change from within: Shia Seminarians' Responses to Contemporary Religious and Social Challenges Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Ali Akbar
This article demonstrates how some contemporary scholars, operating from within the traditional Shiʿi establishment, have paved the way for new interpretations of Islam in general and Shiʿism in particular. To do so, the article focuses on three specific themes: the notion of the (im)purity of non-Muslims, rulings on apostasy and precepts related to women's rights. Following a brief explanation of
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Theological Education in Australia 1964–2020: Intellectual Authority in a Changing Socio-Political Landscape* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Geoffrey R. Treloar
This paper examines the intellectual authority of theological education in modern Australia by tracing its provision from one set of arrangements (the first settlement) inherited from the nineteenth century to another (the second settlement) in the half century from the mid-1960s to ca. 2020. The paper investigates what happened when the exclusion of Theology from the public higher education system
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Tolerating Particularity: German Pietism and Jews' Conversion in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Doron Avraham
Historical discussions about German Pietism's posture toward Jews underlined Pietists' attempts at their conversion as the dominant feature of their relationship. Contesting orthodoxy, Pietists favored a lenient attitude toward Jews, arguing that their change of heart might hasten salvation. However, revisiting Pietists' texts, I argue that from the late seventeenth century on, these awakened Protestants
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Reading Anzac Religion and the Sacred: The Bible as a Central Text and Artefact of Australian Soldiers' Experience of the First World War* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Michael Gladwin
This article demonstrates the resilience of religious traditions and practices among Australian soldiers, and the need for caution about presuming connections between the experience of modern war and secularisation. A core argument is that the Bible should be understood as a central text and cultural artefact of Australian soldiers' experience of the First World War. The pocket New Testament was the
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National Identity in the British Volunteer Sermons, 1794–1802* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-05 Duane Coltharp
From 1794, when the British volunteer movement began in earnest, to 1802, when the French Revolutionary Wars came to an end, the established clergy preached numerous sermons to volunteer military units throughout England and in parts of Scotland. These sermons sought to articulate a sense of Britishness in such a way as to command more or less universal assent, meaning assent both to the ongoing war
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Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Charity: Categories of Difference in the Discourses and Practices of the Belgian Vincentians Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Hannah Fluit
During the nineteenth century, Catholic charity was an important source of poor relief in Belgium, as well as a means for Catholics to practice and express their devotion. Driven by a renewed religious fervour, men and women actively engaged in lay charitable organisations with the purpose of serving God through the poor and working towards self-sanctification. Historical research has especially noted
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Ronald Hutton : Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022; pp. xi + 246. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-29 Blake I. Campbell
In his most recent book, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation, Ronald Hutton explores the historical roots of four pagan feminine figures: Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Old Woman of Gaelic tradition, each of which is provided with a detailed examination. While this book is most certainly an historical analysis of these feminine
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Margaret Coombe (Ed. & Trans.): Reginald of Durham: The Life and Miracles of Saint Godric, Hermit of Finchale. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2022; pp. 1072. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-29 Constant J. Mews
The Life of St Godric of Finchale is not well known. A small passage of that text was included in The Portable Medieval Reader (1979), edited by James Ross and Mary McLaughlin, because it describes how this twelfth-century hermit had once made his living “by learning how to gain in small bargains and things of insignificant price,” becoming in the process a successful merchant (p. 51). He travelled
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“The Country Christ Knew”: New Zealanders' Interactions with Christianity in the Middle East, Greece, and Italy during the Second World War Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-29 Josh King
During the Second World War, New Zealanders of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF) interacted with Christianity throughout the Mediterranean from 1940 to 1945. Stationed in the Middle East, New Zealanders saw the birthplace of Christianity in Egypt and Palestine. In Greece, Crete, and Italy, New Zealanders saw countries where Christianity was deeply ingrained in the landscape and social
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R. B. Jamieson: The Paradox of Sonship: Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021; pp. xix + 196. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Doru Costache
It has been often observed that modernity is about rationalism, compartmentalisation, polarisation, and reductionism. As a symptom of this age, overspecialisation, to paraphrase Isaac Asimov, cuts knowledge at innumerable points and leaves it bleeding. Our culture of dichotomies is the outcome and the living proof of this situation. So is, too, our incapacity to reach coherence across the epistemological
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Dwight L. Moody in Southern Ireland: Modern Evangelical Revivalism, the Protestant Minority, and the Conversion of Catholic Ireland* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Andrew R. Holmes, Stuart Mathieson
Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899) established the blueprint for modern evangelical revivalism. He targeted a broad audience and so avoided contentious points of theology and local political issues. The result was that how Moody was interpreted by those who heard him is often more revealing than the content of his addresses. Moody's three evangelistic campaigns in southern Ireland (1874, 1882–1883, 1892)
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Megan Eaton Robb: Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp. xi + 247. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Justin Jones
While many studies of Muslim urban history in South Asia have centred upon large cities, a particular strand of reflection has long been reserved for the north Indian qasbahs: the small, Muslim townships that dotted the north Indian countryside and were the historic seats of Muslim service gentries. In the last 20 years, scholars including Mushirul Hasan and Raisur Rahman have considered how these
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Rise and Fall of the Brotherhood of St Andrew in the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin: Charting the American Influence in New Zealand's Religious History Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Martin George Holmes
In recent years, scholars have begun to highlight American influences upon New Zealand's religious history. They have demonstrated that even at the height of the British Empire, many non-episcopal churches maintained close ties to their coreligionists in the United States. This article contributes to this field of research by analysing American influences within the Anglican Church of New Zealand,
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David W. Bebbington: The Evangelical Quadrilateral, Volume 1: Characterising the British Gospel Movement, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021; pp. x + 382. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Stuart Piggin
The publication in two volumes of Bebbington's writings on evangelicalism invites reflection on the seminal contribution which he has made to the historiography of the movement. The sixteen papers in volume 1 all “consider themes that affected Evangelicals in general, the issues that influenced their common identity” (p. 2), and all were written after the publication of Bebbington's “classic” Evangelicalism
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Cross-Cultural Generalisation in Three Research Practices: Historicising, Comparing, and Theorising in the Study of Religion\s* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Mattias Brand
This article argues for a re-appreciation of explicit and self-reflective historicising, comparing, and theorising as three research practices that offer the best answers to the main challenges that the historical study of religion\s faces today. In examining these research practices, I stress the intersection of particularising and generalising tendencies. First, the practice of historicising requires
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Historical Data, Comparison, and Systematisation. Some Thoughts on the Challenges and Possibilities of Synthesising Historical and Social Scientific Approaches in the Study of Religion Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Volkhard Krech
This article discusses the introductory remarks to this special issue by Mattias Brand, as well as the two articles written by the Mattias Brand and Gerard Wiegers, respectively. It includes my own reflections in the commentary on the three contributions. First, the article deals with the challenges mentioned by Mattias Brand in his introduction, namely with “questioning of some of the most central
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Do Ut Des – the Relation of Material History and Archaeology of Religion to the Study of Religions* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Anna-Katharina Rieger
Archaeology as “material history” and the study of religions mutually reciprocate through their shared interest in the ability of people to establish memories and create imaginaries. Starting from this presupposition, the article evaluates the approaches used in archaeology to analyse the practices of past peoples. Because of the fragmented nature of the evidence, archaeological methods focus on detailed
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Late Antiquity, Literature, and the History of Religions. In Dialogue with Anna-Katharina Rieger and Sarah Cramsey Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Chiara Ombretta Tommasi
This article presents some reflections on the relationship between literature, history and religion in Late Antiquity, which are meant primarily as a response to Anna-Katharina Rieger and Sarah A. Cramsey, but also takes into consideration some of the other articles in this special issue.
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Caleb Iyer Elfenbein : Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Tells Us About America. New York: NYU Press, 2021; pp. xii + 227. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-12-01 William Rory Dickson
Caleb Iyer Elfenbein's Fear in Our Hearts is a poignant and timely contribution to the growing body of literature on Islamophobia and the conditions that foster it. He carefully charts how public suspicion, fear, and outright hatred of Muslims became normalised in America, especially in the decade following 2010. The book is peppered with stories of individual American Muslims, like Maheen Haq, a college
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Asking Old Questions Anew: On the “History” of “Religions” Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Nickolas P. Roubekas
By taking Hesiod's work from the subfield known as “ancient Greek religion” as both its starting point and case study, this article utilizes the work of Bruce Lincoln to demonstrate that, despite the contrary arguments, the role of history in the study of religion remains central, necessary, and frankly a prerequisite for a sober academic study of religions past and present. Therefore, by resorting
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History and the Study of Religion. Prophecy, Imagination and Religion in the Granadan Lead Books, the Works of Jacobus Palaeologus and of Nicholas of Cusa* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Gerard Wiegers
This article challenges the observation that historians and the discipline of History have not been helpful in addressing some of the important challenges in the Study of Religion by concentrating on “the local” and on deconstruction rather than on construction and “the global.” By undertaking a cross-cultural case study — Medieval and Early Modern prophecies in the Muslim world and Europe — and focusing
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Introduction: Historians in the Study of Religion\s* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Mattias Brand
In this introduction to the special forum discussion on the role of historians in the study of religion\s, I present three main challenges to the discipline: (1) profound questioning of the most central concepts in the historical study of religion\s; (2) increasing fragmentation of the discipline, with many excellent – but hyper-specialised – contributions; and (3) limited success in communicating
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Divine Struggles: Writing Histories of the Jewish Experience that Are Sensitive to Religious Sensitivities* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Sarah A. Cramsey
How can historians untangle the dynamics between intentional religious belief, inherited cultural practices and the numerous contexts (social, cultural, political) that outline relationships between religious majorities and religious minorities? This paper uses the exceptionally complex past of east central Europe in the modern period (and the 1930s/1940s in particular) as a laboratory to study how
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The Study of the Past and its Present Challenges in the Study of Religions Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
The article comments on the three challenges, which Mattias Brand presents in the Introduction: the questioning of central concepts, multiplication and fragmentation, and communication with a large audience. It also comments on Nickolas P. Roubekas article, “Asking Old Questions Anew: On the History of Religions.” The author stresses the lack of stability in the concept of religion and that those definitions
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Religion's Origin: Returns to Grand Theory Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-25 Garry W. Trompf
Two recent impressive works probe religion's origins.
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Kathryn Maude , Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021; pp. Xiii + 207. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Daniel Anlezark
Kathryn Maude's study offers an innovative and insightful new approach to women's literary culture in the early Middle Ages. Named women authors are relatively few and far between in the period, while female scribes can at times be identified by their pronouns and Latin inflexions. Women's patronage of literature is also in evidence at times. Maude's study focuses on texts addressed to women, ranging
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Ursula A. Potter : The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2019; pp. x + 263. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Rosalind Smith
Ursula Potter's study provides a fascinating and timely investigation of how women's biology, or more specifically the womb and women's uterine health, was represented on the early modern stage from the 1560s until the 1640s. Building on recent scholarship in medical humanities by Helen King, Kaara Peterson and Laurinda Dixon exploring women's health and the emerging early modern phenomenon of “green
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Ruben A. Bühner : Messianic High Christology. New Testament Variants of Second Temple Jerusalem. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021; pp. x + 234. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-15 John Moorhead
This study interprets the Christology of the earliest members of the Jesus movement in the light of the messianic expectations of second temple Judaism. Building on the author's doctoral dissertation and making appreciative but not uncritical use of the work of scholars such as the late Larry Hurtado, it is a thorough and occasionally dense study that opens up a new way of looking at its subject. Five
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James G. Clarke , The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2021; pp. x + 689. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Susan Doran
It is impossible to do justice to this wide-ranging book of immense scholarship in a short review. In over 500 pages, Professor James Clark provides readers with a wealth of colourful detail to describe early Tudor monasticism, the crown's relationship with the regulars, and both the process and immediate aftermath of the dissolutions. At the same time, he presents several central theses. First, he
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David Reagles : Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966–1982. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021; pp. x + 213. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-13 Paul Moon
At the time of writing this review, a YouTube clip featuring Malcolm Muggeridge in a 1979 discussion with members of Monty Python about the latter's film The Life of Brian has had nearly 4 million views. I suspect, admittedly without any evidence, that viewers have been drawn to watch the debate in such numbers for reasons other than specifically Muggeridge's appearance in it. Yet, for a time in the
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Clive D. Field : Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; pp. xiii + 269. Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-11-13 David Nash
Interest in the destination of western civilisation's religious impulses rumbles on. Just as one generation of scholars debates the phenomenon into an impasse, another takes it up with renewed vigour and claims of new insights. The latest iteration of this was spurred into life by the conclusions of Callum Brown's striking 2009 book The Death of Christian Britain. This argued for a precise and unequivocal
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Anti-abortion Activism in Poland and the Republic of Ireland c.1970s–1990s* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-07-23 Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, Laura Kelly
This comparative article explores anti-abortion activism in Poland and Ireland from the period of the 1970s to the early 1990s. Drawing on a range of archival and printed sources, it sheds light on the Polish and Irish anti-abortion movements as a part of transnational anti-abortion efforts and underscores the importance of studying such phenomena transnationally, in a comparative perspective. We argue
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One Religion, Two Paths: Making Sense of US and Belgian Catholic Hospitals' Approaches to IVF Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Jessica Martucci, Ronit Y. Stahl, Joris Vandendriessche
This article comparatively analyses the development of Catholic hospitals' approaches to In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) in Belgium and the U.S. Our comparison highlights the different cultures of Catholic healthcare in each of these countries, and their different relation to Vatican opinion on medical matters. We first discuss the roots of Catholic healthcare in both countries and the history of IVF
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Aiding Marital Childlessness: Christian Religious Responses to Husband and Donor Insemination in Belgium and Britain, 1940–1980* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-07-12 Tinne Claes, Yuliya Hilevych
This article compares religious responses to artificial insemination in Belgium and Britain from circa 1940 to 1980. Belgium was predominantly Catholic, whereas Britain was religiously diverse, combining Anglicanism, Protestantism, and Catholicism as the main Christian denominations. Despite these differences, religious actors in both countries became more permissive towards artificial insemination
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Beyond Narratives of Conflict. Modern Medicine, Reproduction and Catholicism in Contemporary Historiography* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-07-12 Kaat Wils, Emmanuel Betta, Isabelle Devos, Tine Van Osselaer, Barbra Mann Wall
Over the last two decades, the topic of Western biomedicine and religion has gained firm ground among historians. While taking distance from both confessional approaches and interpretations of the past that were implicitly informed by a narrative of conflict between medicine and religion, historians have recently integrated phenomena of separate coexistence and examples of mutual influence and collaboration
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Aligning Faith with Medicine: Medical Ethics, Reproduction and Catholic Morality in Francophone and Anglophone Normative Literature, c. 1840–1960* Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-07-02 Jolien Gijbels, Cheryl Lancaster, Andreas-Holger Maehle, Reinout Vander Hulst
This paper focuses on intersections of medical ethics and religious commitments by charting conceptions of the Catholic doctor in French and English-language normative texts from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Behavioural norms for doctors were increasingly emphasised in writings on pastoral medicine, especially regarding obstetrics and advice on sexual hygiene, with the Ten Commandments
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Towards a History of the First Catholic Religious Women Born in Africa or of African Descent (1703–1939) Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Philippe Denis
Religious women born in Africa or of African descent have for a long time played a significant role in the parishes, schools, clinics and orphanages run by the Catholic Church. Their history has rarely been told and they tend to be invisible both in church and society. This paper presents a survey, based on already published studies and easily available primary sources, of the early history of these
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The American Catholic Bishops and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-05-03 Margaret M. Scull
Complex and interworking factors prevented American Catholic bishops from playing a greater role in mediating the Northern Ireland “Troubles.” American Catholic bishops held soft power influence in USA, British, and Irish politics, challenging previous historiographical claims that religion and religious institutions played little role in the conflict. Whereas the American Catholic bishops had actively
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Charitable Activities in the Sixteenth Century: Early Theatine Identity under Carafa Journal of Religious History Pub Date : 2022-05-03 Andrea Vanni
The Theatine order was the first of the new orders of clerics regular founded after the schism provoked by Luther. The dominant historiographical tradition suggests that, immediately following their foundation, the Theatines devoted themselves to charitable work. However, recent studies have revealed that their main founder, Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV), created the Theatines in 1524 because
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