Michael Adegoke

While Protestant Europe argued over confessions and borders, Catholic Christianity rebuilt itself for a world of oceans. The Society of Jesus—approved by Paul III in 1540—became the most famous engine of that rebuild: schools for elites, spiritual direction for cities, and missions from Brazil to Japan. Calling Jesuits merely “shock troops of the Counter-Reformation” captures … Read More

England did not become Protestant because a monk posted theses on a castle door. It became a church under the crown because a king needed a marriage annulment the pope would not grant—and because enough theologians, lawyers, printers, and politicians were ready to turn that crisis into a new constitutional religion. The unique angle of … Read More

In January 1525, in Zürich, a small group baptized one another as believing adults. Opponents called them Anabaptists—“rebaptizers”—and under imperial law rebaptism could mean death. They rejected the label because they denied that their infant baptisms had been true Christian baptism at all. That disagreement looks like a ritual quibble only if you miss the … Read More

Renaissance humanism taught Europe to go back to the sources—ad fontes—in cleaner Latin, recovered Greek, and a taste for the fathers over late scholastic jargon. Christian humanists applied that program to the Bible and the early church. Protestants used the same toolkit to justify rupture. Many Catholics used it to purify preaching, education, and Scripture … Read More

John Wycliffe died in his bed in 1384. Jan Hus died in fire at Constance in 1415. Neither man was Martin Luther in a medieval costume, and treating them as rehearsal actors for 1517 flattens three different centuries. The useful question is institutional: what could a late medieval critic of the Latin church actually change—an … Read More

For nearly seventy years, the bishops of Rome did not live in Rome. From 1309 to 1377 the papal court resided mainly at Avignon, a city on the Rhône under heavy French influence. Critics called it a Babylonian Captivity. Then, after Gregory XI returned to Rome and died, Latin Christendom split in the Western Schism … Read More

Medieval Christianity did not only build cathedrals and crusade armies. It also built classrooms. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Latin Europe invented the university as a durable institution and perfected scholasticism as a method of questioning, distinguishing, and reconciling authorities. Masters lectured on Scripture and Peter Lombard’s Sentences; students disputed; Aristotle’s recovered works forced … Read More

In the early thirteenth century, two new kinds of religious life walked into Europe’s growing cities. Franciscans followed Francis of Assisi into evangelical poverty, preaching, and care for the marginalized. Dominicans followed Dominic of Osma into a disciplined order of preachers aimed at teaching the faith and confronting heresy. Together with later recognized mendicant families, … Read More

The Crusades are often told as a western story: Urban II at Clermont, Frankish knights, Jerusalem taken and lost, military orders, and a long argument about holy war. Eastern Christianity lived a different set of chapters inside the same decades. Byzantine emperors asked for help and feared Latin ambition. Greek bishops met Latin patriarchs installed … Read More

In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, Latin Christendom fought a constitutional war over a ring and a staff. Who had the right to hand a bishop the symbols of his office—the king who needed loyal princes on church land, or the reformed papacy that insisted the church must free itself from lay control? That … Read More