"Whose Faith? Which Sacraments?"

"The deaths of three men define England in the 1530s: Thomas­ Cardinal Wolsey, who died en route to trial and execution in 1530; Thomas More, executed after conviction in a carefully staged trial in 1535; and Thomas Cromwell, bundled to execution without trial by virtue of an act of attainder in 1540. 'If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king,' lamented Wolsey, 'He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.' And he went on to add a pointed warning to future royal councillors: 'Be well advised and assured what matter you put in his head: for you shall never pull it out again.' Thomas More weighed things up a little differently in his final account, saying that he died 'the king's faithful servant, but God's first.' He also protested that he died 'in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church'—and no one was in any doubt as to which church he meant. Cromwell was more guarded: 'I intend this day to die God's servant.' His protestation that he died 'in the Catholic faith,' and his avowals of loyalty to its laws and sacraments were, as MacCulloch remarks, a touch ambiguous."

Richard Rex at First Things reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life.

"To Colour Their Faces with Such Sibbersauces"

"During her reign, Elizabeth became an icon to worship—the Protestant object of a 'royal cult' that, Montrose reports, clashed with and contested the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. This 'cult of Elizabeth,' which emphasized her virginity and beauty, provoked a range of responses among Britons, who 'sustained, elaborated, and appropriated [the cult] to their own ends' during her time in power. Living inside it all, Elizabeth clearly seemed to realize her presentation of a mask that didn't slip was critical to her survival.

Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses the importance of makeup to Elizabeth I.

"The Number of People Living in Mexico Fell From an Estimated 20 million to 2 million"

"Bos and her team have previously identified plague bacteria in the teeth of Black Death victims, but the cocolitzli samples presented a different challenge. Scientists already suspected that the Black Death was caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, but no one is as certain about the exact cause of cocolitzli. So Bos's team repurposed a method called metagenomics that sequences all of the DNA in a sample, generating a long list of all bacteria present in the teeth. One researcher went through the list by hand, and a specific strain of Salmonella enterica popped up repeatedly. Dental pulp samples from five people who died before European contact but buried in the same site contained no significant amounts of S. enterica."

Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic reports on recent research on the cause of "mysterious disease called 'cocolitzli'" in sixteenth-century Mexico.

"The Story of Capitalism Begins Not in Smog-Laden Factory Cities but on the Farms of the English Countryside"

"To be sure, plenty of pre-capitalist societies have relied on some of what we see as the trappings of capitalism: money, trade, markets, and even wage labor. But capitalism itself, Cook argues (like many historians and theorists of capitalism, going back to at least Marx), is something very novel. 'Markets, commodities, and consumer goods,' he writes, 'while certainly necessary components, do not a capitalist society make.' For Cook, it is instead the rise of dividend-producing investments that defines capitalism. First land, and then people, came to be seen not merely as commodities to be bought and sold, but as capital, the price of which was increasingly tied not to some measure of innate value or even to hours of labor committed, but by the promise of future profits."

Adam Gaffney at the New Republic reviews Eli Cook's The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life.

"'You Either Have It or You Don't Have It. And If You Have It, You Can't Get Rid of It.'"

"Prejudices borne of past violence are difficult to overcome. For more than a century following Luther, Christian reformers and their political allies across Europe battled with the Catholic Church-aligned Holy Roman Empire. Catholics slaughtered Protestants; Protestants slaughtered Catholics; and both persecuted groups like the Anabaptists, who championed adult rather than infant baptism. Most traditions did not develop their distinctiveness by accident; many religious leaders staked their lives on their particular interpretation of the Bible."

Emma Green at The Atlantic looks at the state of ecumenism five hundred years after Martin Luther.

And at The Nation, Elizabeth Bruenig reviews new books on Luther.

Columbiana

Edward Burmila at The Nation and Heather Cox Richardson at We're History discuss the history of Columbus and Columbus Day, respectively.

"Everyone Has Encouraged Us That What We're Finding Is Really Exciting and Terribly Significant"

"'We need to know more,' said Eric Klingelhofer, a vice president for research at the foundation and a history professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. 'This whole story is a blank—a blank page, a blank chapter of history, and I think archaeology is the only way to come up with answers.'"


Theo Emery in The New York Times reports on the discovery of possible artifacts from the lost colonists of Roanoke.

"If Physics Can Live With Maddening Truths, Why Can't Literature and History?"

"However, 'Wolf Hall' poses questions not just political but literary. When such a distortion of history produces such a wonderfully successful piece of fiction, we are forced to ask: What license are we to grant to the historical novel?
"For all the learned answers, in reality it comes down to temporal proximity."

Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post ponders fact and fiction.

"There Is, of Course, Much That Historians Can Learn from Novelists"

"Fifteenth-century history is highly contested, and much of what Jones must navigate his way through has been the subject of intense historiographical debate: how much was William de la Pole, Earl and later Duke of Suffolk, chief minister to Henry VI, to blame for what went wrong in the 1440s? Jones does not interrupt his narrative to introduce the disputed nature of events, but he does give a strong line of argument, and those who wish to know the terms of the argument must head to his notes. This is not to suggest any antithesis between history as research and narrative: one paragraph, about the library of Katherine de la Pole, abbess of Barking Abbey, struck me as taking a phenomenal amount of research to construct, but Jones rises elegantly to the challenge."


In New Statesmen, Suzannah Lipscomb reviews Tracy Boorman's Thomas Cromwell: the Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant and Dan Jones's The Hollow Crown: the Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors.

"A Republic of Learning and a Learning Republic"

"It's become a conservative commonplace to argue that the Constitution establishes freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, but Stewart's eloquently argued book makes a strong case that freedom from religion is precisely what America's founders had in mind."


Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.

The Calvinist Moment

"That focus on sinfulness differs from a lot of popular evangelicalism in recent years. It runs contrary to the 'prosperity gospel' preachers, who imply that faith can make one rich. It sounds nothing like the feel-good affirmations of preachers and authors like Joel Osteen, who treat the Bible like a self-help book, or a guide to better business.

"'What you’d be hearing in some megachurches is, "God wants you to be a good parent, and here are seven ways God can help you to be a good parent,"' said Collin Hansen, the author of 'Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey With the New Calvinists.' 'Or, "God wants you to have a good marriage, so here are three ways to do that."' By contrast, Mr. Hansen said, those who attend Calvinist churches want the preacher to 'tell them about Jesus.'"

Mark Oppenheimer in The New York Times reports on the rise of Calvinism among Evangelical Protestants.

"Upended the Entire Intellectual Tradition of Its Discoverers"

"Irish and Italian immigrants proudly pointed to Columbus' Roman Catholic religion to fight the prejudice they experienced in their adopted country, and in 1882, they founded the Knights of Columbus, now the world's largest Catholic service organization. But during the late 20th century, Native Americans bristled at the notion of Columbus' 'discovery,' feeling that their ancestral lands didn't need discovering.
"But the real reason Columbus' voyages should be remembered—and celebrated—is for their central role in prying loose European curiosity from the vise put in place by the medieval church."

Joyce Appleby in the Los Angeles Times considers a legacy of 1492.

And Yoni Appelbaum at The Atlantic discusses the history of Columbus Day.

"It Had Patches on It Like a Hand-Me-Down"

"White made the map and other drawings when he travelled to Roanoke Island in 1585 on an expedition commanded by Sir Ralph Lane. In 1587, a second colony of 116 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island, led by White. He left the island for England for more supplies but couldn't return again until 1590 because of the war between England and Spain.
"When he came back, the colony was gone. White knew the majority had planned to move '50 miles into the marine,' as he wrote, referring to the mainland. The only clue he found about the fate of the other two dozen was the word 'CROATOAN' carved into a post, leading historians to believe they moved south to live with American Indians on what's now Hatteras Island."

The Telegraph reports on an old map that may provide a clue to the fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

Looney's Tune

"'Anonymous' offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatizing this conspiracy, Mr. Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence. Indeed, Mr. Emmerich has treated fact-based arguments and the authorities who make them with suspicion."

James Shapiro in The New York Times criticizes the new movie Anonymous.

"The Dreams of Poets Taken Seriously"

"While it took a Frenchman, Petipa, to make ballet Russian, it took a Russian, Balanchine, to make it American—the most unlikely transposition the art form has ever experienced. 'Classical ballet was everything America was against,' Homans explains. 'It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high—and hierarchical—elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism' designed 'to promote and glorify kings and czars.' Whose divine right would it promote in the land of the equal, the free, the duly (and unduly) elected? But as Balan­chine was fond of saying in the face of the impossible, or highly inadvisable, 'Nevertheless. . . .' And he proceeded to give American dancers an aristocracy all their own."

Toni Bentley reviews Jennifer Homans's Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet in The New York Times.

"A Fool for Love"?

"Far from the reformist evangelical heroine of the Protestant myth, he suggests that she was not a major player in bringing any form of Lutheranism to England, and points to a sermon from her almoner who made a plea for the preservation of church ritual. He suggests she was no theologian and did not lead the assault on the papacy but was more the passive beneficiary when Henry took the power of the pope and declared himself free of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
"This much will trouble those who like to see Anne as a heroine."

In the Los Angeles Times, Philippa Gregory reviews G.W. Bernard's Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions.

"The Romans of the New World"

"The book was sent to Spain during the Inquisition, when works written in indigenous languages were banned, and later given to the Medici Library. Largely forgotten until the early 19th century, it is available only to specialists and is seldom on public view. 'It is an incredible thrill to be able to borrow this iconic work,' Lyons says. 'This will be the first time it has returned to the New World.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Suzanne Muchnic reviews "The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire" at the Getty Villa.

Full of Sound and Fury

"A quarter-century ago all this was unimaginable. In fact, Stevens, along with fellow Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan, ruled unanimously in favor of Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford in a celebrated moot court in 1987. The objection to Oxford's authorship was obvious: Because he died in 1604, he could not have written, sometimes in active collaboration with other dramatists, 10 or so plays after that (including 'Henry VIII,' described by contemporaries as 'new' when staged in 1613).
"What then accounts for the reversal? The facts haven't changed; what has is our comfort level with conspiracy theory as well as our eagerness to seek authors' lives in their works."

In the Los Angeles Times, James Shapiro wades into debates over William Shakespeare's authorship.

Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times reviews three new books, including Shapiro's, about Shakespeare.

Stupendous Man

"Having made the basic analogy between Puritan New England and ancient Israel, some extended the comparison even further, to speculate about the perhaps decisive place of the American colonies in sacred history. In Calvinist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, Israel was usually portrayed as a nation chosen by God to preserve his law until His Son arrived to purify and promulgate it throughout the world. Israel was thus a divine crucible and a providential conduit for the gospels. And so, it seemed, was America--a nation chosen by God to proclaim the repristinized Christianity of the Protestant Reformation to all peoples."

On the eve of John Calvin's five hundredth birthday, Damon Linker in The New Republic traces the theologian's impact on American ideology.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

"But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, 'everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world'—with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention."

David Van Biema in Time reports on the return of Calvinism.