Prayer and Physic in Seventeenth-Century England

Historians have often represented prayer as an instrumental response to illness. We argue instead that prayer, together with physic, was part of larger regimes to preserve health and prevent disease. We focus on early modern England, through the philosophical writings of the physician, Robert Fludd, and the medical records of the clergyman, Richard Napier. Fludd depicted health as a fortress and illness as an invasion by demons; the physician counsels the patient in maintaining and restoring moral and bodily order. Napier documented actual uses of prayer. As in Fludd’s trope, through prayer, Napier and his patients enacted their aspiration for health and their commitment to a Christian order in which medicine only worked if God so willed it. Prayer, like physic, was a key part of a regime that the wise practitioner aimed to provide for his patients, and that they expected to receive from him.

Transnational mediumship and the development of a transhistorical self in the Vale do Amanhecer

The mediumistic practices of the Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) are spreading transnationally through migration and spiritual tourism. This article illustrates the mediums’ circulation between Brazil and Europe, how they forge sacred spaces and mediumistic bodies, and the challenges of translation of the doctrine and rituals. It then proposes a phenomenological approach to the transnational circulation of mediumistic practices focussing on the experiences of mediums, analysing a particular conceptualisation of the self in a transhistorical dimension, which may foster or inhibit transnational mobility. It argues that the notion of a transhistorical self in the context of transnational mediumship gives rise to new configurations of the relationship among place, history, and self, allowing new embodied spatial dispositions and ways of knowing while expanding possibilities of being and belonging trans-space and time.

Reviving the Heartland

This chapter documents the mission of American ecumenist Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., in occupied Germany and surveys the American ecumenical effort to spiritually remake the defeated nation in America’s image. It argues that Herman and other leading American ecumenists sought to reform the German churches along American and ecumenical lines in order to establish a new Christian order across the Atlantic. It also shows that the occupation ultimately yielded a spiritual quagmire within the German Protestant church and the transatlantic ecumenical movement, one shaped by fierce historical divisions and animosities. A deep-seated suspicion toward American spiritual activism and imperialism likewise inspired fierce German opposition to American spiritual reforms. Nonetheless, American Protestants still drew inspiration from the occupation to launch much broader spiritual interventions across the entire European continent.

One Shepherd, One Flock

This chapter examines Spanish, as well as Christian and Islamic, thought on “universal empire.” It analyzes the thinking on universal empire as a form of political organization that developed as a result of the protracted dialogue of competing claims by fellow Christian and Islamic polities. It also addresses Portuguese, French, and Ottoman iterations of universalist claims as the expression of a utopian ideal of religiopolitical organization. The chapter covers the political ideology of the wide variety of literature that situated the Mediterranean at the center of a drama where a universal Christian order would be instated. It also focuses on the Castilian conquest of Granada and the acquisition of numerous presidios and cities along the coast of the Maghrib, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella deployed a variety of propaganda that successfully disseminated the image of the monarchs operating in this capacity.

Poetika smrti v raném díle Bohuslava Reynka

Poetics of death in the early work of Bohuslav ReynekThis article is dedicated to the poetics of death in the early works of the Czech poet, translator and graphic artist Bohuslav Reynek 1892–1971. The author focuses his attention on the topos of death, which is the overarching theme that encloses other important motives associated with it and described by the author as “intermotives”. Typical of the whole first volume of Reynek’s poetry is the combination of the natural world with the vision of a Christian order, which at the end of human life tends toward an apocalyptic end of the earth and confrontation with the salvation of Jesus Christ. Poetyka śmierci we wczesnej twórczości Bohuslava ReynkaArtykuł poświęcony jest poetyce śmierci we wczesnych dziełach czeskiego poety, tłumacza i grafika Bohuslava Reynka 1892–1971. Autor tekstu skupia swoją uwagę na toposie śmierci, na który składają się ważne motywy z nim związane, nazwane przez niego intermotywami. Dla całego pierwszego tomu poezji Reynka typowe jest połączenie świata natury z wizją chrześcijańskiego porządku, w którym kres ziemi i ludzkiego życia w konfrontacji z dziełem zbawienia Jezusa Chrystusa zmierza ku apokalipsie.

Deaconesses in the South China Missions of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), 1922–1951

The ancient Christian order of deaconess, reintroduced into the northern European churches from the 1830s, had grown to include nearly 60,000 women around the world by the 1950s. The Church of England set aside its first deaconess in 1862, but the potential benefits of deploying deaconesses in the southern China missions was not appreciated so quickly by the Church Missionary Society. The Fukien mission ordained the first six deaconesses for southern China in 1922, and another three were ordained in the Kwangsi-Hunan diocese in 1932, but these were all European women. Seven Chinese deaconesses were ultimately ordained in Fukien before 1942, but the only other mission field where the female diaconate rose to prominence was Hong Kong, where Florence Li Tim-oi’s ordination as a deaconess in 1941 led to her controversial ordination to the priesthood in 1944. This essay examines the slow growth of the deaconess movement in the CMS south China missions up to 1950 and evaluates the achievements of these women before the closure of China to Western missionaries. It also suggests some reasons why the widespread hopes that the female diaconate would provide an ‘enlarged sphere of service’ for women missionaries in south China ultimately proved elusive.

Commerce and Consumption

This article examines how Protestants related to the world of goods and commercial exchange. Recent scholarship has moved beyond Max Weber’s initial formulation of the Protestant Ethic and examined these relationships from multiple perspectives, including the history of art and architecture, economic history, cultural history, and the history of ideas. Protestants’ sundering of the holy from the corporeal transformed the meaning of ecclesiastical architecture and ornamentation, while at the same time directing pious donations toward communal welfare, especially almsgiving. Commercial practices were generally judged by their utility to the community and, later, the state. Mainstream Protestantism endorsed property rights, social distinctions, and reasonable consumption as the hallmarks of Christian order, while marginal movements presented alternate visions of the place of property, exchange, and luxury in the Christian life.

‘Edward Semper Augustus’: E. A. Freeman on Rome, the Papacy, and the Unity of History1

This essay explores E. A. Freeman’s conception of the ‘unity of history’. Often presented in ‘Whiggish’ and secular terms, as the development of Roman imperialism into Teutonic liberty and nationality, this idea had deep religious roots and significances. Modernity, for Freeman, evolved in creative ‘continuity’ with Rome; but he considered that legacy contested by rival forms of Catholic Christianity – the papal-Roman, and the Orthodox-Anglican. From the emergence of this tension in Freeman’s youthful notions of the Church, history, and liberty, the essay charts a deepening aversion to ‘ultramontanism’, conceived as an integral programme of papal oppression – ecclesiastical, political, and scientific. The fall of papal Rome to the liberal-national campaign for Italian unification (1870) should have meant the vindication of Freeman’s liberal Catholic vision. The ambivalence marking his response, however, suggested his deepening anxieties concerning the future of modernity’s Christian order.