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1999, Church History
We know relatively little about prophecies or “exercises” that early Elizabethan reformers devised as in-service training. Nearly all textbooks report that Archbishop Grindal objected to government orders that prophesying be suppressed, for, in 1576, his reservations cost him the queen's and regime's confidence. Yet the suppressed exercises have lately been depicted as tame Elizabethan adaptations of continental practices that featured sermons delivered publicly but discussed only clerically. That was so in Zurich, Emden, and elsewhere, but I think that if we look at prophesying again, look, that is, at what the critics, patrons, and partisans said about the exercises in England, we will discover that lay involvement and initiative were just as subversive and disruptive as some thought at the time.
2015
This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.
The Catholic Historical Review, 2002
This paper examines the gift or prophecy as understood in the Reformed tradition following the Reformation. It identifies different uses of the word, and shows that there was a full acceptance of prophecy as preaching, wide acceptance of occasional predictions, but a general rejection of post-biblical prophecies that claimed to reveal God's will for his people.
Reformation, 2012
Beware False Prophets: The Contest over Prophecy in the Late Middle Ages, 2019
My book reveals a series of crucial moments when the contest over knowledge of the future erupted in late medieval Europe. I pinpoint specific struggles-over definitions of prophecy, the right of laypeople to prophesy when prelates failed, the role of clerical oversight, the possibility of female prophets, and the role of professionalization in future-telling. I situate this debate within the upheavals over spiritual and intellectual authority that convulsed late medieval Europe during the conciliar era.
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2003
Social Science Research Network, 2020
Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento, 2015
Extracting Meaning from Ploughsoil Assemblages, ed. R. Francovich, H. Patterson and G. Barker, 2000
Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 2017
Speech to Province of the Western Cape, 2005
Opiniães – Revista dos Alunos de Literatura Brasileira, 2015
2016
In I volti di Dio nel cristianesimo antico secc. I-IX. XLIX Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità Cristiana (Roma, 11-13 maggio 2023), 135–52. Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 165. Roma: Pontificium Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum; Nerbini, 2024
Physics of Plasmas, 2002
Clinical Radiology, 2007
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2020