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For nearly forty years George of Laodicea (c. 290–359) played a significant role in the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy. Yet among scholars of the period his contribution has been understudied, underappreciated and misunderstood. This article aims to reconstruct George's career in a way that eliminates earlier distortions, corrects certain oft-repeated mistakes and includes frequently omitted evidence. It argues that George was one of the principal leaders of the Eusebian alliance in its last two decades. It also suggests that his leadership role in the Homoiousian alliance was more significant than is usually thought: he was the catalyst for its formation and emerged as its champion in the aftermath of the failed leadership of Basil of Ancyra.

Historians of science have often looked to the authentication of miracles at canonization trials as a way to investigate the ways in which religious and scientific understandings of the natural and the miraculous came together and, sometimes, into conflict. Most historians of science who have forayed into the world of miracles have, understandably, stopped at the moment of a saint's canonization. Examining the treatment of a saint's miracles both before and after the canonization process, however, yields a different picture. Drawing upon materials from the 1455 canonization and subsequent cult of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), this essay reveals, first, that papal approval marked only one of several ways in which miracles received publicly-accepted “authentication,” and second, that, after the moment of canonization, the idea of carefully authenticated miracles became irrelevant not simply for the great masses of the faithful, but also for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who adopted an ever shifting rhetoric of authenticity as authors used tales of the saint's “authentic” miracles to drive home their own various polemical points.

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to Christian—in the social and cultural context of empire. Epiphanius can help us reconsider late-ancient conversion not as the internal reorientation to a “new life,” but instead the exteriorized management of status and difference. As Epiphanius crafts conversion as the site of masterful intervention, he also conjures the failure of control, the blurring of boundaries, and collapse of frontiers that haunts the imperial Christian imagination.

In hymn vi of his Peristephanon, Prudentius dramatically reworks the plot of the Passio Fructuosi. The poet turns the perpetrators from well-known and dutiful representatives of a transient empire into despicable caricatures of evil and vice, transforms the martyred bishop from a caring pastor into a heroic leader of heroes, re-narrates the roles of Christian family members as anonymous martyr-cult devotees, and shifts the focus from the martyred bishop as a local, beloved model of imitation and encouragement during a time of persecution to the three martyrs together as co-equal objects of worship and patrons and saviours of their region and devotees.

For 700 years a tale has been told about an English woman who was elected pope in the mid-ninth century. Called Pope Joan, she supposedly was born in Mainz of English parents. Dressed as a man, she traveled to Athens with a lover, acquired an education, moved to Rome, impressed the cardinals (who did not know she was a woman), and was unanimously elected pope. While crossing the city in a procession she unexpectedly gave birth near the church of San Clemente, died on the spot, and was buried there. Joan’s story cannot be traced back to the ninth century. It arose in the thirteenth century and was universally believed until the sixteenth century. In succeeding historical periods the figure of Joan proved useful to many writers.

The Catholic priest Leocadio Lobo (1887-1959) is an icon of the Spanish Civil War, but his life has never been submitted to rigorous study. His exile in the United States from 1939 to 1959 is essential to an understanding of his life. His Republican ideology, contrary to that of the regime of General Francisco Franco, was the reason for his exile. Lobo believed that it was possible to be Catholic without supporting the Franco regime, but he was unable to offer an adequate response to the religious persecution that occurred in the Republican zone during the Civil War. In the United States, he underwent rehabilitation as a Catholic priest and developed an extraordinary pastoral ministry in New York City, primarily to the Hispanic community.

The experience of Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) and the Christian Assembly ( Jidutu juhuichu or Jidutu juhuisuo ) in Mainland China after the Communist Revolution of 1949 reveals the complexity of church and state relations in the early 1950s. Widely known in the West as the Little Flock ( Xiaoqun ), the Christian Assembly, founded by Watchman Nee, was one of the fastest growing native Protestant movements in China during the early twentieth century. It was not created by a foreign missionary enterprise. Nor was it based on the Anglo-American Protestant denominational model. And its rapid development fitted well with an indigenous development called the Three-Self Movement, in which Chinese Christians created self-supporting, selfgoverning, and self-propagating churches. But it did not share the highly politicized anti-imperialist rhetoric of another Three-Self Movement, the Communist-initiated “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” ( sanzi aiguo yundong ): self-rule autonomous from foreign missionary and imperialist control, financial self-support without foreign donations, and self-preaching independent of any Christian missionary influences. As the overarching organization of the one-party state, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement sought to ensure that all Chinese Protestant congregations would submit to the socialist ideology.

According to his vita, sometime around the year 600 diocesan business brought Bishop Gaugericus of Cambrai to Aquitaine, where he took the opportunity to visit a shrine in or near the city of Perigueux honoring one Fronto. Here the bishop experienced a miracle: as he approached the tomb, Gaugericus unknowingly outpaced his attendants, who were consequently not at hand to take the staff he let go as he knelt; nevertheless, the staff remained suspended. After crediting this wonder to its hero's virtue, the Vita Gaugerici sets him, duly awed, on his way once more without another word for Fronto, whose tomb merely served as backdrop. Fronto of Perigueux thus makes his first appearance in surviving sources as a figure easily overshadowed, even at his own shrine; yet tradition would gradually exalt this seemingly quiescent saint to dizzying heights of status and power. From this inauspicious beginning, Fronto of Perigueux rose over the coming centuries is achieve, ultimately, identification as one of Christ's seventy-two disciples, apostle to Auuitaine, and champion of the early Gallic church. Here, Herrick examines the dossier of Fronto of Perigueux.

On 7 September 1443 Osbern Bokenham, an Augustinian friar of Clare Priory, Suffolk, began writing a life of St. Margaret in English verse for his friend and fellow friar Thomas Burgh. The work sparked off a local demand for similar English lives of female saints, and Bokenham received a series of subsequent commissions from prominent members of the East Anglian gentry and nobility. For instance, at a party on Twelfth Night 1445, Dame Isabel Bourchier, sister of Richard, duke of York, requested that Bokenham compose a life of Mary Magdalen, a saint for whom she had a particular devotion. Other noblewomen commissioned lives of their patron saints, such as Elizabeth de Vere, wife of the twelfth earl of Oxford, who requested a life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The result of these individual commissions is a collection of thirteen lives of female saints in verse, which were assembled and copied into a single manuscript in Cambridge in 1447, now London, British Library, MS Arundel 372, and given to a local nunnery. This work is now known by the modern editorial title the Legends of Holy Women.