bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The so-called Statutes of John Pecham and Robert Winchelsey for the Province of Canterbury
Authors: Cheney C. R.
Published: March 2011

Among the legislators of the medieval English Church John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury, 1279–92, is remembered chiefly on account of canons published in two councils early in his pontificate, at Reading in July-August 1279 and at Lambeth in October 1281. His successor, Robert Winchelsey (1294–1313), less celebrated for his laws, none-the-less is assigned by Lyndwood, the fifteenth-century canonist, nine chapters of the Provinciale. The ‘Winchelsey’ documents and some others described in medieval manuscripts as ‘Statuta’ or ‘Constitutiones’ or ‘Decreta’ of one or other of the two archbishops cannot be immediately or surely connected with any known provincial council. They include texts on questions of almost daily occurrence to medieval archdeacons and parochial clergy: about the calculation of tithe, the duties of stipendiary priests, the obligations of the laity for church repairs. Lyndwood glossed many of them. Modern students of history and canon law commonly cite them. It is, therefore, of some importance to establish the degree of credit which may be allowed to the ascriptions. This study will consider the evidence of the manuscripts and will aim at sorting the genuine statutes from the spurious and the dubious. Some of each kind will be found. The enquiry may not only help to determine the nature of these particular documents, but also may reflect light on other doubtful legislation and illustrate the ways in which laws were framed and customs established in the English Church in the later Middle Ages.
The Seven Bishops and their Petition, 18 May 1688
Authors: Thomas Roger
Published: March 2011

Late at night on 18 May 1688 the bishops, granted an audience by James II, handed him their petition. ‘When he looked upon it he said he knew whose handwriting it was, as well he might, for it was the Archbishop's.’ It certainly was the archbishop's hand, but it was not wholly his work, nor that of the other six bishops who had signed it with him and who now presented it to their king. How this document came into being is the subject of this paper.
Alan Kirketon: a clerical royal councillor in Normandy during the English occupation in the fifteenth century
Authors: Allmand C. T.
Published: March 2011

The search for royal councillors was one of the major difficulties which Henry V had to face once he had achieved the conquest of Normandy. Many local royal officials, having taken the oath of loyalty to the king, were confirmed in their posts; others were brought over from England—a system which proved satisfactory at first. But the finding of personnel for the higher offices presented Henry with a serious problem. Since he was unwilling to trust the native French at so early a stage he could, and did, begin by seeking the counsel of his fellow-countrymen. But this method could not continue indefinitely, since it did not correspond with the intentions lying behind the conquest, planned to be lasting and permanent. However, the alliance with Charles VI, cemented in 1420 by the Treaty of Troyes, meant that the English could now call upon a number of Frenchmen, many of Burgundian origin or sympathy, to serve in the royal council. It was soon realised, too, that the university of Paris was an admirable seed-ground for future royal councillors, especially lawyers, of whom there was need. By the end of Henry V's reign, a number of these graduates were already employed by the English: under the regency of the duke of Bedford they soon achieved a numerical superiority in the royal council in France. From now on, the English dominions were to be ruled by men of these two groups.
Non-Residence in the Lincoln Diocese in the Early Sixteenth Century
Authors: Bowker Margaret
Published: March 2011

In his Introduction to The Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln 1517–1531, the late Professor Hamilton Thompson drew attention to the large number of pluralist and non-resident parish priests in the diocese in the early part of the sixteenth century. He could do no more than comment on a few cases, since the scribe did not bother to include in the comperta the names of all delinquents, their alleged reasons for non-residence nor the details about their licences. More recently attention has been drawn to the actual number of non-residents, but no attempt has been made to go behind the figures to the individual priests and parishes concerned.
A List of the Works doubtfully or wrongly attributed to Johannes Scottus Eriugena
Authors: Sheldon-Williams I. P.
Published: March 2011

Eriugena made a name for himself both by his outstanding scholarship and by the boldness, not to say the heterodoxy, of his opinions. As a natural consequence of this, there has been since the Middle Ages a tendency to attribute to him works displaying these characteristics for which no more likely author could be found. My ‘Bibliography’ of Eriugena was an attempt to give an account of his genuine writings purged of these accretions, and I made no reference to them in it. As, however, many of them have been published under his name in Migne's Patrologia and elsewhere, and as the literature in which their genuineness is questioned or refuted is not always easily accessible, it seemed that a supplement to the ‘Bibliography’ containing a list of the works that were excluded from it with, where possible, the reasons for their exclusion might be useful. This supplement breaks no new ground: particularly, my debt to Dom Maïeul Cappuyns is greater than in the ‘Bibliography’ for, whereas more Eriugena material has come to light since he wrote, I know of no work excluded by him from the Eriugena corpus which has since been proved to be genuine. Such value as this note has is that of convenience.
The Commissary of the Bishop in the Diocese of Lincoln
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2011

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.
A Reappraisal of Simon Sudbury, bishop of London (1361–75) and archbishop of Canterbury (1375–81)
Authors: Warren W. L.
Published: March 2011

Simon Sudbury is one of the more obscure archbishops of Canterbury.He should be better known, if only because he was archbishop during a particularly confused but important period of English history—the period of Edward III's dotage and Richard II's minority. Anything which casts a little light upon the politics and personalities of that period should be welcome to historians.
The Background of Apollinaris's Eucharistic Teaching
Authors: Bates W. H.
Published: March 2011

The eucharistic doctrine of Apollinaris is of more than passing interest as illustrating the kind of piety of which his whole system is the fruit. However, we do not possess any systematic treatise on the Eucharist from his pen, still less any liturgy described as ‘Apollinarian’. In fact, in dealing with this subject, attention must be concentrated entirely on two fragments, where the eucharistic reference is unmistakable. To discuss the significance of these fragments, and to try to give some indication of their relation to the rest of the fourth century liturgical tradition as we know it, is the aim of this paper.
Fasciculi Zizaniorum II
Authors: Crompton James
Published: March 2011

John Bale acquired the MS. of Fasciculi Zizaniorum sometime after he left the Carmelite Order and before 1540 when he went into exile in Germany taking it with him. He was already familiar with Fasciculi Zizaniorum long before he left his Order. Bodley MS. 73 is an autograph MS. of Bale's and is one of his earliest notebooks. The bulk of it was written before 1524, though there are several later additions, the latest of which is 1526. This notebook was compiled, therefore, whilst Bale was a zealous Carmelite student, and before he went abroad to Toulouse and Louvain. It is a mine of miscellaneous information about the Carmelite Order: a list of all the Carmelite houses in England with their dates of foundation; the names of all the Priors Provincial of the Order; descriptions of the antiquities of many Carmelite houses, of the friars buried in different convents, often with their epitaphs; a lengthy selection of the letters of Thomas Netter. Of special concern here are Bale's notes on Carmelite writers. The ascription of the authorship of Fasciculi Zizaniorum to Thomas Netter of Walden first appears in this notebook in Bale's notes on Walden, where he says that Netter wrote the Doctrinale Ecclesie and Fasciculus Zizaniorum. The incipit to the latter work he gives as ‘Colligite Zizania’, which appears on the second folio of our MS. Later there follow four folios of ‘Extracta quedam ex fasciculo doctoris fratris Thome Walden’. There can be no doubt that all these extracts are taken from our MS., which was well known to Bale. He summarises its contents as far as the condemnation of Wyclif at the Council of Constance. His summary is interesting.
The capitular text of the Responsiones of pope Gregory I to St. Augustine
Authors: Deanesly Margaret
Published: March 2011

In the course of an article on these Responsiones in this Journal (x. (1559) 1–49), it was suggested that a text of these replies, long known to canonists as the ‘capitular’ text, was older than that in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede; and, also, that the fifth Responsio in the Bedan text, which contains the long controverted permission to marry within the third and fourth generation, was an interpolation made, possibly, if not probably, by the priest Nothelm. Nothelm had corresponded with Bede over many years, and he later became archbishop of Canterbury. The writers of the article did not know at the time that Dom Paul Meyvaert had in preparation an edition of the Responsiones based on the text as found in canonical collections. The publication of this edition is much to be desired; but, meanwhile, it seems permissible to point out that the ‘capitular’ text is found in the oldest MSS. and that the Bedan text is never found in any MS. earlier than Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written in 731. If it had been, the question of priority could not, of course, have arisen.
Clerical Taxation in England, 1485 to 1547
Authors: Scarisbrick J. J.
Published: March 2011

I believe that the Henrician Reformation was a thoroughly revolutionary event, or set of events. It was revolutionary in a constitutional sense in declaring Henry head of the nation-church—as also in an ecclesiological one. It was revolutionary, ere long, in a further theological sense and, ere long again, revolutionary in its effect on property ownership and all that that implied. And, on top of this, it was a landmark in political and administrative history.
The Records of the Court of Arches
Authors: Slatter M. Doreen
Published: March 2011

The surviving continuous records of the Court of Arches, or, to give it its full modern style, the ‘beloved Court of Canterbury of the Arches’, tell its history only from the Restoration. It had already been respected for centuries as the chief ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and a large number of suits continued to come before it every year. The judge or Official Principal, commonly known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge in the archbishop of Canterbury's peculiar of that name, was a person of considerable influence and importance. The proctors and advocates who conducted the cases were the more successful members of a flourishing profession. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Oughton, the writer on ecclesiastical law, who was a proctor of the court, spoke of it with awe and veneration. ‘Let us reverently enter on one of the court days into the sanctuary of this august tribunal. … Behold! How solemn, how awakening the aspect of justice! … At first glance who is not penetrated with emotions of affection and veneration!’ But the court was shorn of most of its jurisdiction during the nineteenth century and it was described by Dickens in 1850 with very different feelings. The society of Doctors' Commons, the stronghold of the profession of the ecclesiastical law, was dissolved in accordance with the Court of Probate Act of 1857 and its buildings were pulled down.
The Non-Subscription Controversy amongst Dissenters in 1719: the Salters' Hall Debate
Authors: Thomas Roger
Published: March 2011

It was as a breath of fresh air that the first news of the debates at Salters' Hall came to a young minister in a remote country village in Somerset, where he had found asylum because he had deviated slightly from the received Calvinism of his day and been made to feel the oppressiveness of the orthodox atmosphere of Dissenting congregations in the neighbouring county of Devon. When the news came he had recently seen two of the four Exeter ministers, James Peirce and Joseph Hallett ejected by the Trustees from the city meeting houses as the result of what seemed to him a vendetta led by a certain John Ball, minister at Honiton. It is with evident exhilaration, therefore, that on the first news of the Salters' Hall debates he wrote to a friend:

‘Mr. [Ball]'s conduct with respect to Mr. Peirce and Mr. Hallet, will render him infamous throughout the kingdom. … Blessed be God, that he has stirred up such a noble spirit of Christian liberty in London: where it was carried in a meeting of above an hundred ministers, at Salters-Hall, that no human tests, articles, or interpretations should be urged as the trial of a man's orthodoxy; and that no minister should be condemned as heterodox, or an heretick, unless he taught, &c. contrary to express scripture. This was the substance of one part of their determination.’
The Anamneses and Institution Narrative in the Liturgy of Apostolic Constitutions Book VIII
Authors: Pitt W. E.
Published: March 2011

More than one comprehensive theory of liturgical history has made much of the difference between the eucharistic prayer in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus and that described in the Catecheses of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The former consists of a thanksgiving for creation and redemption through Christ, leading to an institution narrative, and followed by an anamnesis and an epiclesis, in which, however, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the oblation is asked for, not to convert it, but to join the Church in one. The latter consists of a ‘preface’ (which is not a thanksgiving, although the opening dialogue suggests that it will be) and sanctus, followed at once by a fully consecratory epiclesis, and intercessions. It is true that scholars of former generations thought that the prayer described by St. Cyril was, in fact, a fully developed prayer of the Syro-Byzantine type, and that St. Cyril only commented on certain paragraphs of it. It was natural to think so when it was believed that the liturgy of Apostolic Constitutions VIII, which contains the oldest known prayer of this type, was the work of St. Clement of Rome and a true description of apostolic practice; but it will hardly do to-day, when we know that Apostolic Constitutions was written several years later than St. Cyril's Catecheses. Besides, St. Cyril describes the prayer in considerable verbal detail, a procedure which is not easy to reconcile with the omission of whole paragraphs. Nor will it do to say that he comments upon the institution narrative elsewhere; he could scarcely explain the Eucharist to catechumens without doing so, but that hardly explains how, after mentioning and explaining the various choirs of angels who sing the sanctus, he could pass over the thanksgiving for creation and redemption, institution narrative, and anamnesis without a word, and expect an audience of people who were new to Christian worship to be able to follow the prayer as a result. And it would be a strange coincidence if the parts omitted by St. Cyril were just those which are in the Apostolic Tradition.
The Historical Background of the English Lectionary of 1955
Authors: Willis Geoffrey G.
Published: March 2011

The preface to the Book of Common Prayer, entitled Concerning the Service of the Church since 1662, but before that simply The Preface, was derived substantially from the preface to the revised Breviary of Quiñones, which was one of the sources for the revised daily offices of the Church of England. It appeals from what it considers the corruptions of the medieval office to the ‘godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers’. This order, it says, was devised for the systematic reading of holy scripture in the offices of the Church, and it was the intention of the compilers of the English Prayer Book to restore such a regular order of reading for the instruction of the people. It represented a revolt against three features of the lessons in the medieval breviary: first, against the frequent interruptions of the reading of scripture in course by the occurrence of feasts with proper lessons; secondly, the lack of completeness and continuity in the lessons themselves; and thirdly, the use of non-biblical material in the lessons. Even if the daily office of the breviary, which is based on the ecclesiastical year, were not interrupted by any immoveable feasts having proper lessons, it would still not provide for the reading of the whole of scripture, as its lessons are too short, and also the variable lessons are confined to the night office.
The Theological Legacy of St. Cyprian
Authors: Wiles M. F.
Published: March 2011

‘Into theology Cyprian scarcely ever entered’, wrote W. D. Niven, yet d'Alès's book La Théologie de S. Cyprien covers more than 400 pages without appearing to be dealing with a non-existent subject. The prima facie conflict is not difficult to resolve. A religious leader can no more help talking theology, whether consciously intending to do so or not, than Molière's M. Jourdain could help talking prose. An unconscious theology, indeed, can be every bit as important and as influential as a fully selfconscious one; in fact, its influence is very liable to be the greater, because succeeding generations are less likely to be aware of it and so less likely to submit it to critical scrutiny and review. In no case is this largely-unconscious influence more significant than in the case of Cyprian. All the other outstanding writers of the third-century western Church ended their days in schism. Tertullian, Hippolytus and Novatian were all far greater theologians than Cyprian, but all three broke from the catholic Church in support of the rigorist cause. In spite of this fact, their importance for later theology remains considerable. But that importance is a fully conscious theological one. Where their ideas were accepted and developed, it was because they carried conscious conviction as theological ideas; the fact of who it was who was the father of the ideas did little to commend them.
A Consistory Court in the Middle Ages
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2011

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.
The Duke of Wellington and Catholic Emancipation
Authors: Machin G. I. T.
Published: March 2011

The passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 ended a highly controversial struggle and marked an important stage in a gradual revolution in Church and State. Yet the duke of Wellington, whose political standing and skill were largely responsible for its passage, has rarely been given due credit for it. His popular reputation is still that of a wartime genius but a peacetime Blimp. His resistance to parliamentary reform is vividly remembered, but his adoption of Catholic emancipation is lightly passed over in comparison. It is widely believed that he yielded to emancipation only because he was forced to do so by the irresistible demands of O'Connell and the Irish Catholics. More recent accounts have hinted at a different picture, but the old image is far from being completely exorcised. It is the aim of this article to show that, instead of blindly opposing Catholic emancipation until further resistance was both useless and dangerous, Wellington had long regarded the question with an empirical eye and had, in fact, been considering means of passing it years before 1829.
A Note on Gilbert Sheldon
Authors: Higham Florence
Published: March 2011

In 1883 Osmund Airy published in the British Quarterly Review some ‘Notes on the reign of Charles II’, in which he stressed the fear of popery still felt by the average Englishman. He instanced this by describing the feelings aroused by the king's issue of an Indulgence in December 1662. ‘Charles’, he wrote, ‘was not long left in ignorance of the feelings he had roused … The meeting, as we should say, spoke at once through its chairman’. ‘We were fortunate enough some while ago’, Airy continues, ‘while searching in the British Museum on this subject, to find a letter which we believe has not anywhere been noticed, addressed to the King by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, who appears to represent completely the savage side of the Anglican Church’. Airy proceeded to quote the letter in full, noting ‘this is written within three months after the proposal for comprehension, probably in January’. The letter is violent in tone, referring, for instance, to ‘that most damnable and heretical doctrine of the Church of Rome, whore of Babylon’, and warning the king that by his action he may draw upon himself and the kingdom in general ‘God's heavy wrath and indignation’. A number of later historians have followed Airy in attributing the letter to Sheldon, though not without surprise at the unlikely language.
Byzantium and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century
Authors: Nicol D. M.
Published: March 2011

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantine empire was at the height of its glory. The emperor Basil II, who died in 1025 after a reign of nearly fifty years, completed and consolidated the work of the two great soldier emperors before him, and deserves to rank with Justinian and Heraclius as among the greatest of all the rulers of Byzantium. In the East the Arabs had been beaten back and humiliated; on the North the Bulgars were savagely defeated by Basil himself and their territory reduced to a province of the empire; Armenia and parts of the Caucasus were conquered; and the Mediterranean was cleared of pirates and policed by the Byzantine fleet. The internal security of the empire seemed unshakable, its riches inexhaustible, and its prestige extended far beyond its boundaries. It was in 989, in the reign of Basil II, that the largest of the Slav states came within the Byzantine sphere of influence, when Vladimir of Kiev married the emperor's own sister and was converted to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine culture. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantines were justly proud of themselves, of their empire, its civilisation, stability and prosperity, and equally of their Church. They were more convinced than they had ever been of the truth, cherished since the days of Constantine, that the Roman empire was God's plan for the order of the world, or, as Eusebius had said, the terrestrial image of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that its ruler, the one true emperor in the ‘Queen of Cities’, was divinely ordained as God's regent on earth.
William of Malmesbury's Life and Works
Authors: Farmer Dom Hugh
Published: March 2011

The movement which we call the twelfth century Renaissance included a revival of Latin classics and Roman Law, the rediscovery of much Greek and Arabic science and philosophy, the development of Romanesque architecture into Gothic, and the writing of history of greater quantity and improved quality. John of Salisbury, archbishop Theobald's curial clerk, who died in 1180 as bishop of Chartres, is generally regarded as England's most finished product of this movement, but a generation before him William, monk of Malmesbury, already displayed many of its characteristics. A polymath whose interests included history and hagiography, law and the classics, archeology and architecture, he had however none of John's cosmopolitanism or contact with the great men of his day, he had little acquaintance with science or philosophy and contributed nothing to the development of theology. A monk all his life, he was representative of the scholarly Benedìctine researcher (he was almost halfway in time between St. Bede and Mabillon), but he was also outstanding because he had the genius and the wide range of interests which were shared by few.
Ecclesiastical Politics and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1618–1648
Authors: Kearney H. F.
Published: March 2011

The internal politics of the Counter-Reformation varied in accordance with the individual circumstances of each European country. Nevertheless, many of the problems raised were common to all. The reception of the Tridentine decrees, the clash of regular and secular clergy, the pressure of local, ecclesiastical, and secular interests, the influence of the Spanish monarchy, and the part played by changing conditions in the structure of the Curia itself, especially the foundation of the Congregation of Propaganda in 1622—these affected societies as disparate as the Holy Roman Empire and Ireland. Against this background, Irish ecclesiastical history is of more than parochial or diocesan interest, and its disputes during the early seventeenth century throw light, by analogy, upon wider European developments. Indeed, so far as the British Isles are concerned, the Counter-Reformation was mainly an ‘Irish question’, much as Catholic Emancipation was to be later, although it was to throw up no figures of the same calibre as Campion or Parsons.
The Baptist Western Association 1653–1658
Authors: Nuttall Geoffrey F.
Published: March 2011

The identification of a tract without title-page or caption title in the Library of the Society of Friends in London, together with the location in the Library of the Baptist College, Bristol, of another tract of which no copy was known to exist, makes it possible for the first time to summarise fully the beginnings of the Baptist Western Association. The Association's activity, apart from days spent in waiting upon God in fasting and prayer, was twofold: the resolution of queries submitted by the churches represented; and the issuing of circular letters of exhortation to the churches. Circular letters issued from nine of the Association's first ten meetings are printed in the first of the tracts mentioned, queries submitted and resolved at nine of the meetings in the second. From other sources we know that in 1655 the Association ordained as its superintendent Thomas Collier, the editor of both tracts; and that in 1656 it issued aConfession of the Faith. An assembly of ‘messengers’ or representatives of churches in the South-Western counties of England, meeting normally once in the spring and once in the autumn, the Western Association was a pioneer among those regional associations of churches which have ‘always been a feature of Baptist life’. Correct information concerning its meetings and leaders, and the churches represented, is thus desirable. The fifty-seven queries, moreover, with the answers they received, throw light upon issues then the concern of many beyond Baptist circles.
The Episcopate of Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells, 1443–1465
Authors: Judd Arnold F.
Published: March 2011

Thomas of Bekynton, the son of a weaver, a famous churchman of the fifteenth century, was born about 1390 at Beckington, a village three miles north of Frome in the county of Somerset. He was admitted to Winchester College under the election of 1403, proceeded to New College, Oxford, on 24 June 1406, was elected a fellow 25 June 1408, admitted B.C.L. in 1414 or 1415 and incepted D.C.L. in 1418. He resigned his fellowship in November 1420 in order to become chancellor of duke Humphrey of Gloucester until he became secretary to king Henry VI in 1437. He was ordained sub-deacon on 20 December 1421, and priest on 18 September 1423 at Salisbury on the title of his benefice of Sutton Courtney. Preferments rapidly followed, the most important being the archdeaconry of Buckingham to which he was collated on 15 October 1424. From that date he would be summoned to attend Convocation and he acted as prolocutor at the sessions in November 1433, 1434 and May 1438 (session 28 April to 18 October 1438, with prorogation). He was Dean of the Arches in 1422 (possibly earlier) and it is most likely that he carried on up to 1433 when in October he became Official and remained in that office until April 1438. Thus for nearly five years he held simultaneously the two most important offices of Prolocutor and Official of the Court of Canterbury, having for nearly eleven years been Dean of the Arches.
Anglican Churchmen and the Establishment of the Jerusalem Bishopric
Authors: Welch P. J.
Published: March 2011

On 8 June 1841, Frederick William of Prussia sent Christian Carl Josias Bunsen on a special mission to England. Bunsen was to obtain the approval of the British government for a conference between himself on one side and Howley, as Primate of All England, and Blomfield, as immediate head of the congregations of the Anglican Church abroad, on the other. In this conference, he was to try to persuade the two prelates to concede to the Evangelical Church of Prussia ‘a sisterly position’ in the Holy Land. Deploring the disunity among Evangelical Protestants there, Frederick William instructed Bunsen to propose the establishment of a bishopric at Jerusalem as a joint enterprise by the Evangelical Church of Prussia and the Church of England. He would allow the clergy and missionaries of his own Church to work under the auspices of such a bishopric; and, whilst it was not his intention to sacrifice or jeopardise the independence of the Church of Prussia, any ordinations by the bishop of Jerusalem would be respected throughout his dominions. Two principles were to guide Bunsen: the utmost possible collaboration among protestants in the Turkish Empire, especially in the Holy Land, and the maintenance of an independent Evangelical German Church. Frederick William was intelligent enough to see that political and economic facts ruled out an exclusively Prussian episcopate in the Holy Land: it was a shrewd move to attach German congregations to a bishopric closely associated with the Church of England.
The Heretics Combatted by Ignatius of Antioch
Authors: Molland Einar
Published: March 2011

In all the Ignatian epistles, except the Epistle to the Romans, we find polemical remarks and warnings against heretical tendencies which threatened the churches of Asia Minor.

It is not quite easy to obtain a clear picture of the heretics combatted by Ignatius. One point only is evident: their docetism. They considered Christ's life on earth, his birth, his human body, his death and resurrection as mere appearance.
The Date of the Outbreak of Montanism
Authors: Freeman-Grenville G. S. P.
Published: March 2011

In the last century the school of Tübingen held that Montanism is only a name invented by historians to describe certain currents of thought in the second century and later. But although the evidence for the movement is not so full as one might like, there is no more reason to doubt its historicity than most other contemporary movements or even persons. It is not easy to get rid of the later legal prescriptions of the Theodosian and Justinian Codes; while Aelius Publius Julius, bishop of Devultum in Thrace, expressed himself in no uncertain fashion: ‘As God in heaven liveth, I swear that the blessed Solus of Anchialus wished to cast out Priscilla's demon, and the hypocrites would not allow it.’ The Montanists were real enough to him.
The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2011

Two generations of lawyers and historians of the early Church have worked over the scanty evidence bearing on the legal and political relations between the first Christian communities and the Roman Empire. It is not the intention of the present writer to add to the enormous volume of work on the subject. The results of their battles have been ably summarised by A. N. Sherwin-White, and with his conclusions the legal problem may be allowed to rest until new evidence is forthcoming. The object of this paper is to look at the question from another point of view, and to ask who were the sufferers, and in particular, who were martyred in the period before the first general persecution under Decius. Were Polycarp, Justin, Blandina and the rest chance victims of private denunciation and the fury of the mob, or did they represent a tradition of belief in which martyrdom became the climax of earthly life? And what of those who obeyed the precept to flee during persecution? Was their action due to cowardice, or was it the belief that martyrdom was not the will of God? Can we see in the controversy over martyrdom which engaged so much of Tertullian's energies, one more phase in the strife between the orthodox and gnostic concepts of Christianity, on the outcome of which so much in the future of the Church depended? What, in fact, was the relationship between the Gnostics and the Roman authorities?
Slavonic Translations of Early Byzantine Ascetical Literature
Authors: Heppell Muriel
Published: March 2011

‘D'une manière générate, on peut dire que les littératures chrétiennes de l'Orient sont largement tributaires de la littérature grecque.’ This statement of the late Paul Peeters concerning oriental hagiographical literature may equally well be applied to that of the Slavs. At the same time it does not in any way detract from the merits of original Slavonic hagiography to admit its debt to the Byzantine influences which it preserved and enriched. The principal channels by which these influences were transmitted were Slavonic translations of Greek works, mainly ecclesiastical, which were made from the late ninth century onwards. Among these translated works, which formed the nucleus of early Slavonic literature, were the most important Byzantine hagiographical compilations and ascetical treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries: theApophthegmata Patrum;the Ἀνδρν γων ββλος (=The Book of Holy Men); theLausiac Historyof Palladius; theHistoria Monachorum;theHistoria Religiosaof Theodoret of Cyrus; thePratum Spiritualeof John Moschus; and theScala Paradisiof St. John Climacus. There is also evidence that theParaenesisof Ephrem the Syrian was translated, and at least one treatise by, or attributed to, Evagrius, as well as the LatinDialoguesof Gregory the Great, this last from its Greek version.
The Administration of the Diocese of Worcester ‘Sede Vacante’ 1266–1350
Authors: Haines R. M.
Published: March 2011

The claim of the archbishops of Canterbury, by virtue of their metropolitical power, to administer the spiritualities of vacant sees within their province, culminated during Boniface's archiepiscopate (1245–70) in compositions between the archbishop and the chapters of Lincoln, London, Salisbury and Worcester. These permitted the members of the chapters to administer their respective sees at times of vacancy, but it was at Worcester alone that the head of the chapter, the prior, or failing him the sub-prior, secured the right to automatic appointment as official sede vacante. We are concerned here with the events which led up to the Worcester composition of 1268, the composition itself, and its implementation during the first half of the fourteenth century.
John William Colenso: a Fresh Appraisal
Authors: Hinchliff Peter
Published: March 2011

It is probably no one's fault that general histories of the Church in the nineteenth century are so misleading about bishop Colenso. Unless one gets down to the primary source material, which is almost all in South Africa, there is no way of escaping from the distortions of controversy. Almost all the books about Colenso are unreliable. His own biography was written by an ardent admirer who hoped to succeed him as bishop of Natal. The lives of his principal opponents, Robert Gray and James Green, are just as unsatisfactory. Gray's life was written by his son. Green's was written by Dr. Wirgman, a frank and open controversialist. Histories of the Province of South Africa are either missionary propaganda, or else become so immersed in the constitutional and legal issues connected with Colenso, that the character of the man himself is lost. In consequence, the bishop of Natal appears in history as a kind of religious schizophrenic—on the one hand a great missionary who loved the Zulu people with an infinite tenderness and, on the other, a wilful and spiteful heretic for whom no action was too base and mean. Or, worse still, he is represented as a brilliant but misunderstood fore-runner of modern biblical scholars who was also by accident a South African missionary.
A Polish Vernacular Eulogy of Wycliff
Authors: Schlauch Margaret
Published: March 2011

Though well known to specialists in the history of early Polish literature, the figure of Andreas (Andrzej) Galka of Dobczyn, an ardent admirer of John Wycliff, is probably not familiar to English students of Middle English. This fifteenth-century professor at the University of Cracow is notable for several reasons. Not only is his eulogy of Wycliff a precious monument of medieval Polish, but his Latin letters also have great interest, revealing as they do a colourful and pugnacious individual whose meteoric career is linked with some profound social changes occurring in his age and country. Both his literary activity and his personal adventures relate him to the movement for Church reform then sweeping over central and eastern Europe, as a precursor of the more decisive movement which was to occur in the early sixteenth century.
Grosseteste and the Theory of Papal Sovereignty
Authors: Tierney Brian
Published: March 2011

‘Because of the obedience by which I am bound to the Apostolic See…filially and obediently, I do not obey, I oppose, I rebel.’ The more we learn of Robert Grosseteste's achievements as theologian and scientist the less likely does it seem that he will be remembered in the future—as he used to be in the past—principally for this letter of defiance concerning papal provisions in the diocese of Lincoln. Yet the letter itself remains something of an enigma in spite of all the attention it has received from a long line of scholars. It may seem an unprofitable task to go gleaning in a field where workers like Maitland and Sir Maurice Powicke have helped with the harvest, but we would suggest that Grosseteste's direct refusal to obey an unambiguous papal command has never been adequately analysed from one obvious point of view—as an extreme instance of a classical problem of political theory, the right to resist an unjust command of a divinely ordained power.
Jewish and Christian Ordination
Authors: Ehrhardt Arnold
Published: March 2011

In recent discussions about the Apostolic Ministry of the Church the Jewish factor in its development has proved a disturbing element. Therefore, a book dealing with the early rite of rabbinical ordination, which has been lately published in Germany, should be certain of an interested reception, even though the main facts can be found already in Billerbeck. Dr. Lohse, its author, shows himself well versed in rabbinical literature, and the evidence which he has collected is well-nigh complete. Unfortunately, the author's main thesis, although it is by no means new, is apt to provoke serious misgivings. For he claims (101) that ‘the Christian ordination was modelled on the pattern of that of Jewish scholars, although early Christianity filled it with a new content’. To support his claim the author has given only one important reason, namely that both rites had the imposition of hands as their centre. The other support which the author has tried to build up to strengthen his thesis is, to say the least, feeble. It is therefore necessary to enquire whether the laying-on-of-hands had the same intention in the early Christian ordination rite as in the rabbinical rite. Such identity of intention is, however, not even to be found in all the various cases of laying-on-of-hands in the New Testament, and the same is also true of contemporary Judaism.
The Contribution to the Study of the Fathers made by the Thirteenth-Century Oxford Schools
Authors: Callus Daniel A.
Published: March 2011

In the medieval schools the Bible and the Fathers of the Church together constituted the fundamental argument in theological speculation. They were the two auctoritates, though different in order and degree, upon which the whole structure of the Sacra Doctrina was built. ‘The foundation stones of the edifice, of which the masters in theology are the architects’, as bishop Grosseteste in a famous letter addressed to the regent-masters in theology at Oxford put it, ‘are the books of the Old and the New Testaments’. The authoritative interpreters of Holy Writ are the Fathers of the Church. It was, therefore, imperative that the Masters in Sacra Pagina should be familiar with both the biblical and patristic teaching. That they were deeply versed in Holy Scripture cannot be doubted. Their writings bear witness to their thorough knowledge of the Sacred Books. The Bible was the text-book of the faculty of theology, the beginning and the end of the whole theological course. And since it was their main duty to expound the Scriptures, the masters in Divinity were rightly styled Magistri in Sacra Pagina, or in Sacra Scriptura.
A Tuscan Monastic Lordship in the Later Middle Ages: Camaldoli
Authors: Jones P. J.
Published: March 2011

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.
The Winning of the Countryside
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2011

The Christian ministry of bishops, priests and deacons is essentially an urban one. It developed in the two generations after the fall of Jerusalem when the Church, though practically destroyed in Palestine, emerged as a religious and cultural force among the synagogues of the Dispersion. These were predominantly urban communities, and their organisation had developed accordingly. Except, however, for the final phase in Jerusalem, Jesus's message had been directed almost exclusively to the inhabitants of rural Palestine. The Greek cities he had passed by: he had preached in the territory of Caesarea Philippi, but not in Caesarea itself (cf. Mk. viii. 27) and the illustrations for his parables were drawn from the daily life of the Palestinian countryside. In this paper I propose to trace briefly how this message ultimately penetrated the countryside of the Graeco-Roman world and beyond, and to suggest how its inhabitants, finding the plain words of Jesus's teaching more intelligible than the philosophic commentaries of the urban Christians, may have played their part in shaping the development of thought and doctrine in the early Church.
England and the Roman Curia under Innocent III
Authors: Cheney C. R.
Published: March 2011

The relations of England with the Curia in the thirteenth century is hardly a subject neglected by historians. From A. L. Smith to C. H. Lawrence stretches a long line of scholars who have been concerned during the last sixty years or so with the impact of papal authority on this country in that century. Meanwhile, on the continent, the vast output of studies on papal doctrine and curial machinery elucidate the particular question of England's links with Rome. When so much has been written, and where so many experts are in the room, it is temerarious to say more. I do not intend to present a startling new view of Anglo-papal relations in the time of Innocent III. My object is much more modest. For the last few years Mrs. Cheney and I have been tracing as much as possible of the correspondence between the Roman Curia and England during that pontificate, 1198–1216. All I want to do is to offer a few facts and figures and reflexions which come from our search.
Arguments for Religious Unity in England, 1530–1650
Authors: Russell Conrad
Published: March 2011

Père Lecler, in his survey of Toleration and the Reformation, concluded that ‘among all the countries that were divided by the Reformation … England comes last so far as tolerance is concerned. Even the simple freedom of conscience which was gradually extended to the whole of Europe, was constantly threatened in England by police inquiries’. With the exception of Spain, Italy and possibly Scotland, the English government was more successful and persistent in its attempts to enforce unity of religion than its counterparts. The explanations of this fact are probably largely political: in most European countries, the willingness to listen to tolerationist arguments was in proportion to the practical difficulty of suppressing dissenters. As Professor Owen Chadwick said, ‘Catholic France accepted the Edict of Nantes in 1598 … not because Catholic France affirmed toleration to be merely right, but because without the Edict France must be destroyed’. The victory of toleration was normally a victory of expediency over principle. Featly, for example, says that ‘toleration of different religions falleth in some respects, within the compass of the mysteries of State, which cannot be determined in the Schools, but are fittest to be debated at the Council table’.