This book treats the decades between about 1050 and 1180. It is a cultural essay on the spirits that drove culture and politics in Europe's "twelfth century." Medieval Europeans contested issues across the spectrum, on God, nature, society, human beings, and customary practice. Lest, as too often, religion get isolated from learning or society from letters, this book lifts out those dynamic forces that cut across social groups. For narrative purposes I have identified these as revolt, reason, reading, and romance. These new energies in turn employed modes of communication that assumed new prominence or took peculiar forms, intellectual and social as well as material, among them letters, glosses, preaching and poetry (Latin and vernacular). The book, though a cultural history, draws upon social sources (law, chronicles, charters), and self-consciously integrates figures often left out of the general story, including women such as Hildegard of Bingen.

Completion of a book project on the history and influence of John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” sermon ("A Model of Christian Charity") from 1630 to the present.

This project is a biography of John Winthrop's "city on a hill" sermon from 1630 to the present day. Cited today by politicians and many others as the origin of American exceptionalism, this sermon has become foundational to American history and literature. Yet in its own day, it went unrecorded, unpublished, and completely unnoticed. Found in 1838, Winthrop's sermon only gradually became important, achieving status as an American classic in the mid-twentieth century. This study asks how it rose and with what effects. Ever since its rebirth, I show, competing interpretations of the text have offered contending visions of American community and purpose. Drawing on several methodologies, my biography of Winthrop's sermon becomes, finally, a history of exceptionalism and "the meaning of America" as it has emerged from--and been contested in--rediscoveries, reinventions, and reinterpretations of America's past.