"Heretical Plagues" and Censorship Cordons: Colonial Mexico and the Transatlantic Book Trade
by Martin Austin Nesvig

This article examines the role of the Index of Forbidden Books in early Mexico and its enforcement or lack thereof. The Index, issued by the Spanish Inquisition beginning in the mid sixteenth century, was the culmination of centuries-old traditions of theology and jurisprudence that linked heresy and heretical books with infection and disease and the undermining of Christendom. The Index was thus viewed as a tool to prevent the spread of heresy in Catholic lands. Images of inquisitional censorship often focus on the supposed uniformity and hegemony of its power without examining the process by which censorship was enforced. This articles shows that in the Mexican context censorship was more ad hoc, contingent and idiosyncratic than previously assumed. It examines the daily application (or misapplication) of the Index in ports, urban centers, and rural areas to demonstrate the inconsistent power of the censorship apparatus of the Inquisition.

Ruling Eldership in Civil War England, the Scottish Kirk, and Early New England: A Comparative Study of Secular and Spiritual Aspects
by William M. Abbott

Historians have given a number of explanations why the Long Parliament, in attempting to create an English church government to replace episcopacy, rejected the Scottish high presbyterian model that featured powerful “lay” or “ruling” elders. One such explanation that deserves fuller exploration is MPs’ desire to separate secular from spiritual functions: a desire that had lain behind much of the root-and-branch effort against episcopacy in 1641 and which would militate against the office of ruling elder in the parliamentary debates of 1644-46. A comparison of parliamentarian attitudes toward this office during the Civil War with attitudes towards it in two places where it had been more successful, Scotland and New England, shows that churches in the latter two places were able to bridge the gap between layman and cleric sufficiently to grant such officers considerable power, while Long Parliament MPs, their recent experience of “lordly prelacy” having made them less comfortable with the wielding of secular functions by clerics and spiritual censures by laymen, were reluctant to give such power to the lay-clerical hybrid that was ruling eldership.

John Clarke and the Complications of Liberty
by Theodore Dwight Bozeman

It is a seldom-mooted commonplace that anglophone Baptist movements in the 17th-century championed full freedom of the religious conscience, rejected the use of force in spiritual affairs, and, either expressly or by implication, accepted the corollary of religious pluralism. A case study of John Clarke, a prominent Particular Baptist of the mid-to-later 17th century whose career spanned Rhode Island and the parent country, yields a more mixed conclusion. It finds that the religious toleration which Clarke and his co-religionists affirmed did not stand alone. It was connected to and delimited by other and especially prophetic beliefs. As one of many Baptists involved in the Fifth Monarchy movement of the 1650s, Clarke linked issues of conscience at once to two different domains of meaning: the fleeting contemporary world and the imminent end-times Kingdom. In the first, the meaning of freedom was calculated relative to the preliminary endtimes struggle underway in revolutionary England against Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian manifestations of Antichrist. In the second, when King Jesus came to climax the process, he would establish, not a plural but a monistic and probably Baptist order in which the saints and their vision, replacing the ousted hierarchs of Antichrist, dominate all. Within Clarke’s eschatologically shaped view of the present and future, religious toleration was both heavily qualified and ephemeral.

"The Devil Begins to Roar": Opposition to Early Methodists in New England
by Eric Baldwin

The introduction of Methodism into New England in the early decades of the new republic prompted considerable opposition from the region’s established clergy and other defenders of the standing order. The hostile response was a product not merely of religious competition and theological differences but also of significant anxieties about the proper relationship between religion and the wider society. Established clergy feared that the Methodist itinerants would break apart churches and divide communities, thereby turning religion – one buttress of community cohesion and social order – into a source of social instability. Such fears were given urgency by memories of the divisions spawned by the awakenings of the 1740s and by anxieties about the corrosive effects of democratic excess arising in the post-Revolution years. Further, the arrival of the Methodists represented one episode in the larger struggle surrounding the emergence of religious voluntarism and the passing of religious establishments; hostility to Methodism reminds us that the embrace of voluntary principle in religion did not always come easily. Even after disestablishment and the acceptance of the voluntary principle, Methodism continued to attract suspicion as a source of disorder and immorality, demonstrating that anxieties about Methodism’s role in society had not been put to rest even as late as the 1830s.