Categories
Archive Nota Bene Steven Wedgeworth

Luther’s Personality: Fearsome or Fun?

Church history and hagiography are not always so easy to distinguish. We paint certain pictures of personalities with little or no solid evidence, but rather base them on sentiments formed much later (sometimes even sentiments we form internally). An obvious case in point is the way in which Martin Luther is typically thought of as […]

Categories
Archive E.J. Hutchinson Nota Bene

The Historical Situatedness of the Patron Saint

In his classic introduction to late antiquity, Peter Brown notes that the idea of the “patron saint” is an outgrowth of the social dynamics of the late Roman Empire, in which common people – clients – needed advocates at a distant court to which they did not have access. It was, then, not an outgrowth […]