The Celibate Bridegroom and His Virginal Brides: Metaphor and the Marriage of Jesus in Early Christian Ascetic Exegesis, by Elizabeth A. Clark

The metaphor of the "celibate Bridegroom," Jesus, although suffering from epistemological incoherence, nonetheless performed useful service in the early Christian world:  both marriage and celibacy could be symbolically valorized, and all Christians--whether married, male, or sinful--could be imagined as "brides of Christ."  Yet the metaphor ran up against representations of the afterlife in ways that complicated the discussion.  Metaphor theory is here employed to demonstrate how the values of marriage and sexual relation continued to "hover over" this particular metaphor, lending a positive "charge" to both the encouragement of sexual renunciation and visions of post-earthly bliss.

Siblings and the Sexes within the Medieval Religious Life, Fiona J. Griffiths

In 1156, the German visionary Elisabeth of Schönau received a series of revelations concerning Saint Ursula, whose body, together with some of the eleven thousand virgins supposedly martyred alongside her, had allegedly been discovered in a cemetery just outside the city walls of Cologne.  Elisabeth’s revelations, which were prompted by the arrival at Schönau of two bodies from Cologne (one male and one female), resulted in one of her most controversial and certainly most popular works, the Liber revelationum.  Prompted to investigate the Cologne discovery by “certain men of good repute”, Elisabeth reports that she was visited first by Saint Verena and then by Saint Caesarius, cousins whose bodies had come to rest at Schönau.  The two regaled her with stories of the martyrs’ journey from Britain to Cologne and confirmed for her the authenticity of their relics.  Such confirmation was necessary: Elisabeth admits that she had initially been skeptical of the association with Ursula, since male as well as female bones had been discovered in the Cologne cemetery.  “Like others who read the history of the British virgins,” she confesses, “I thought that that blessed society made their pilgrimage without the escort of any men.” The bones of men, intermingled with those of women whose very sanctity depended on their virginity, caused Elisabeth no small discomfort.  Pressing her saintly visitors on this point, Elisabeth nevertheless received assurance that although many men had indeed accompanied the women, they had done so licitly, primarily as members of the women’s families.

Vested Struggles: The Social and Ecclesiological Significance of Stoles in Seventeenth-Century France, Paul Scott

A series of highly publicized ecclesiastical disputes throughout the seventeenth century in France culminated in many instances of litigation over an apparently inconsequential topic: the permitted use of a liturgical vestment — the priestly stole. The cases documented in this article include the archbishop of Amiens storming out of his cathedral over his dean’s refusal to remove his stole and a group of pastors pursuing their archdeacon in the courts over his prohibition of their wearing the stole during his visitation. This garment becomes emblematic of deep-seated power struggles during the period: of archdeacons resenting their diminishing status; of pastors subverting post-Tridentine agencies of control; and of the Paris Parlement asserting its jurisdiction in church affairs. One erudite and eccentric pastor of the diocese of Chartres, Jean-Baptiste Thiers, author of thirty-two works, becomes an unlikely mouthpiece of lower clergy and rural parishes against external control. An analysis of his rebellion against his superiors reveals that his stance was not only motivated by protection of his flock but also stems from his Richerism, the doctrine that priests are successors of the apostles and therefore enjoy a parity with bishops, a surprisingly radical position

The Religious Heritage of the British Northwest and the Rise of Mormonism, by Stephen J. Fleming

In Radical Origins: Early Mormon Converts and their Colonial Ancestors (2004), Val D. Rust argues that early Mormon converts descended disproportionately from “radical” New England persons and enclaves.  A work unused by Rust, Cedric Cowing’s The Saving Remnant: Religion and the Settling of New England (1995), suggests that these same individuals came disproportionately from the British North and West.  Indeed disproportionate numbers of both Mormon ancestors and British Northwesterners are found among the Pilgrim Fathers, the followers of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, the early New England Quakers, and the accused and accusers in the Salem witch trials. Likewise, the early British converts came disproportionately from the Northwest.  Thus early Mormonism both came out of and appealed to a particular British sub-culture.  Since the imposition of Protestantism, Northwesterners, both those who immigrated to America and those who remained in Britain, sought to recapture the tangible supernaturalism that Protestantism had suppressed.  Northwesterners experienced a series of religious awakenings, particularly in the form of Quakerism and Methodism, that sought to reinvigorate this supernaturalism.  These traits persisted in both the United States and Great Britain and made Northwesterners distinctly receptive to Mormonism. 

Saint Apolo from Europe, or "What's in a Luganda Name?"
by Emma Wild-Wood

At the turn of the twentieth century Apolo Kivebulaya, ‘the one from Europe’, was a Gandan evangelist and priest in the employ of the Church Mission Society. Through the careful study of layers of meaning attributed to Kivebulaya’s name, his clothing, and his literacy, and their association with power, the relationship between culture and conversion is examined. I argue that his successful ministry is attributable to his ability to both associate himself with Europe and respond to African concerns. In accepting Christianity he and his converts were active agents in cultural change, selecting and interpreting influences from their own cultural background and providing new expressions of Christianity and of their cultures in the process.

"No Mystery God": Black Religions of the Flesh in Pre-War Urban America, by Clarence E. Hardy III

Responding to historian Judith Weisenfeld’s challenge to consider the largely unexamined “connection between the urban ‘sects’ and ‘cults’ and [the broader] African American Protestant tradition,” this article looks beyond associational links between sectarian groups and mainstream churches to the emergence of a new cultural orientation and language that celebrated the personal and the concrete over the abstract, and shaped the evolution of black religion as a modern culture in an increasingly industrial age. Notions of public responsibility had shaped black behavior toward the norms and expectations of white bourgeois society right after Reconstruction.   The influence of these norms waned among African Americans as many (in the South and elsewhere) began to articulate an increasingly cosmopolitan attitude with more awareness of the global possibilities among and for black people.   As Victorian sensibilities favoring emotional comportment and bodily restraint faded in the opening decades of a new century, black urban dwellers participated in a larger cultural renaissance during the 1920s and 30s that brought new attention and emphasis to the physical body.  Popular dances and music enabled bodily expression that absorbed and transmuted the rhythms of modern life into a human exuberance that demonstrated the possibilities of collective joy and performance while maintaining and even accentuating individuality. The same modern rhythms that propelled bodies in clubs and dance halls also helped to define new religious forms in songs, sermons and other forms of religious practice.