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In Part I of Christianity and History, the author asks whether the committed Christian should be more conscious than the uncommitted of some meaning in history. In answering this he offers a critique of Arnold Toynbee and makes some penetrating observations on the teaching of history. Part II is concerned with the author's special field-the Protestant Reformation and its origins. Calvinism, with its dynamic sense of the historical process, receives special treatment, and there is a brilliant essay on Machiavelli and Thomas More. Three of the essays included in this new book appear here for the first time. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Historiography has shown great interest for many decades in eunuchs and their role in premodern societies. But scholars of medieval Europe have not paid a great deal of attention to the clerics whose genitals were amputated. Drawing upon the example of men who had mutilated themselves and sought to become deaconst priests or bishops, this paper shows how their exclusion from the sacred sphere has been shaped in medieval canon law and what were the possible exemptions to the general rule. The pope himself and more especially the Apostolic Penitentiary played an eminent role in their integration since they granted special authorizations and dispensations to all priests or aspiring priests who were lacking their virilia. Finally, we try to explain why this prohibition addressed to eunuchs reflects the Catholic Church's broader conception of masculinity.

This paper relates the four Latin quotations in Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus to the play’s broader themes of communication and comprehension. In all four cases the characters’ superficial understanding of the meaning of the quotation contrasts with the striking implications of the original Latin context. The resulting irony is augmented by Peele’s changes to Seneca’s Latin, which add layers of meaning by rearranging and conflating multiple source texts. This technical conceit represents in miniature the allusive character of the entire work, in which various literary models are cited, inverted, and spliced together to create a play that is both recognizably classical and unrecognizably disfigured.

This absorbing book explores the tensions within the Roman Catholic church and between the church and royal authority in France in the crucial period 1290-1321. During this time the crown tried to force churchmen to accept policies many considered inconsistent with ecclesiastical freedom and traditions--such as paying war taxes and expelling the Jews from the kingdom. William Jordan considers these issues through the eyes of one of the most important and courageous actors, the Cistercian monk, professor, abbot, and polemical writer Jacques de Thérines. The result is a fresh perspective on what Jordan terms \"the story of France in a politically terrifying period of its existence, one of unceasing strife and unending fear.\" Jacques de Thérines was involved in nearly every controversy of the period: the expulsion of the Jews from France, the relocation of the papacy to Avignon, the affair of the Templars, the suppression of the \"heresies\" of Marguerite Porete and of the Spiritual Franciscans, and the defense of the \"exempt\" monastic orders' freedom from all but papal control. The stands he took were often remarkable in themselves: hostility to the expulsion of Jews and spirited defense of the Templars, for example. The book also traces the emergence of King Philip the Fair's (1285-1314) almost paranoid style of rule and its impact on church-state relations, which makes the expression of Jacques de Thérines's views all the more courageous.

In early medieval Europe, dreams and visions were believed to reveal divine information about Christian life and the hereafter. No consensus existed, however, as to whether all Christians, or only a spiritual elite, were entitled to have a relationship of this sort with the supernatural. Drawing on a rich variety of sources-histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines-Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions. Moreira analyzes changing attitudes toward dreams and visionary experiences beginning in late antiquity, when the church hierarchy considered lay dreamers a threat to its claims of spiritual authority. Moreira describes how, over the course of the Merovingian period, the clergy came to accept the visions of ordinary folk-peasants, women, and children-as authentic. Dream literature and accounts of visionary experiences infiltrated all aspects of medieval culture by the eighth century, and the dreams of ordinary Christians became central to the clergy's pastoral concerns. Written in clear and inviting prose, this book enables readers to understand how the clerics of Merovingian Gaul allowed a Christian culture of dreaming to develop and flourish without compromising the religious orthodoxy of the community or the primacy of their own authority.

The question of how much apocryphal Gospels were rebutted, suppressed or even destroyed in antiquity is a question of perennial interest, both popular and scholarly. The present article makes no attempt at any sort of complete answer to this question, but has the rather more modest aim of analyzing the various testimonia—from antiquity into the middle ages—that make explicit reference to a “Gospel of Thomas.” This article will not touch on the numerous allusions to, or quotations of, the contents of this Gospel, but will be confined to treatments of the title (hence “named testimonia”). The impetus for this particular investigation is of course the presence, at the end of the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, of a colophon reading “The Gospel according to Thomas.”1 Given the controversial contents of this Gospel, and the equally controversial place that it occupies in scholarly reconstructions of Christian origins, Thomas's reception in antiquity has been widely discussed since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (see n. 2 below).

The role that class and ethnicity played in the self-fashioning of the professional men of letters who shaped fifteenth-century Spain's humanist project has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny for over fifty years. It was José Antonio Maravall who first demonstrated that the so-called letrados had a “conciencia estamental,” a class consciousness derived from their indispensable roles as administrators, advisors, diplomats, and chroniclers in the service of the crown. Subsequent scholarship showed that part of letrado self-consciousness resulted from the hostility of Old Christian noblemen toward these ambitious non-noble, university-trained men, many of them New Christians or conversos. One way in which the aristocracy stigmatized the intellectual pursuits of the letrados was in fact to call those endeavors “Jewish.”

Randall comments on Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public. Habermas's juxtaposition of the ancient and the early modern forms of the public sphere is correct; at the same time there is a coherent historical evolution linking the two. The history of rhetoric provides the site for this evolution, from the oral rhetoric of Antiquity, through medieval epistolary rhetoric and the humanist rhetoric of the private letter, and finally by way of the Renaissance rhetoric of the news letter to early modern newspaper rhetoric, which is either a correlate or a constituent of the Habermasian public sphere. Here, he also provides a lineage for the English newspaper via the medieval and Renaissance genre of the private letter.